this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
121 points (97.6% liked)

Programming

17507 readers
9 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
[โ€“] jim 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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, and null. You can technically only replace a non-nullable field to a timestamp column because you are treating null in timestamp as false.

Two examples:

  1. 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_agreed to agreed_at.

  2. Adding a boolean column to an existing table. These columns need to either default to an value (which is fair) or be nullable.

[โ€“] lukad 10 points 1 year ago

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.

load more comments (3 replies)