Storing NULL Values in large VARCHAR fields I have a table that represents a "note". This note has things like a title and various other meta data. However, I'm trying to figure out the best practice for storing the contents of the note.

Currently, my strategy is to have the contents of the note be a VARCHAR(10000) and just store a NULL value if there are no contents. But, I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do, or if this will cause performance or storage issues.

I am very new to constructing databases - am I going about this the right way?
A note with no contents sounds like a fairly meaningless object to me. I would model this by the absence of such tuple in the notes table!

p.s. a note's title is an attribute. An example of metadata ("data about data") would be the date a note's title attribute was most recently updated.