Inserting values into numeric fields

Greetings all,

I'm trying to insert values into a numeric field which may be optional. I'm
using perl's DBI and bind parameters to do this. However, psotgresql
complains that '' is not a numeric, since the DBI quotes everything before
inserting.. I've tried inserting NULL as well, but that gets quoted and
rejected as well.

Is there any way to do this without hard coding "NULL" into the prepared
statement handle?

Thanks!
Eric Carpenter