this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
121 points (97.6% liked)
Programming
17308 readers
211 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ehhh, I don't quite agree with this. I've done the same thing where I used a timestamp field to replace a boolean. However, they are technically not the same thing. In databases, boolean fields can be nullable so you actually have 3-valued boolean logic:
true,false, andnull. You can technically only replace a non-nullable field to a timestamp column because you are treatingnullin timestamp asfalse.Two examples:
A table of generated documents for employees to sign. There's a field where they need to agree to something, but it's optional. You want to differentiate between employees who agreed, employees who disagreed, and employees who have yet to agree. You can't change the column from
is_agreedtoagreed_at.Adding a boolean column to an existing table. These columns need to either default to an value (which is fair) or be nullable.
Using a nullable Boolean to represent 3 distinct states just adds confusion and complexity to your system. In most cases I would prefer to use an enum with 3 fields which is non nullable.