If you using MYSQL which the syntax appears to point at; you could do the following:
ALLOW_INVALID_DATES
Do not perform full checking of dates. Check only that the month is in
the range from 1 to 12 and the day is in the range from 1 to 31. This
is very convenient for Web applications where you obtain year, month,
and day in three different fields and you want to store exactly what
the user inserted (without date validation). This mode applies to DATE
and DATETIME columns. It does not apply TIMESTAMP columns, which
always require a valid date.
This mode is implemented in MySQL 5.0.2. Before 5.0.2, this was the
default MySQL date-handling mode. As of 5.0.2, the server requires
that month and day values be legal, and not merely in the range 1 to
12 and 1 to 31, respectively. With strict mode disabled, invalid dates
such as '2004-04-31' are converted to '0000-00-00' and a warning is
generated. With strict mode enabled, invalid dates generate an error.
To permit such dates, enable ALLOW_INVALID_DATES.
However like everyone has said in the comments, it's not possible to stick a " " in a field whose data type is DATETIME.
NULLif column constraints isNULL. insert into tableName(START_TS) values (NULL)NOT NULLconstraint, then you could insert aNULLvalue. There is no blank (white spaces or'') data forDATETIMEfields, that concept can apply only forCHARandVARCHAR(and derived) datatypes.