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On Booleans And Database Portability

05.23.2006
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        From Coda Hale: http://blog.codahale.com/2006/04/20/on-booleans-and-database-portability/.

On booleans and database portability

Oh, booleans. Simplest and most elusive of database types. How to specify you? Y and N? T and F? 0 or NULL and anything else? If only we knew…

When working on a Rails app that uses different databases (say, SQLite for development/testing and MySQL for production), be sure that your conditions clauses aren’t assuming a particular form of boolean representation.

This will return nothing in SQLite:

@monkeys = Monkey.find(:all,
  :conditions => 'rabid = 0')

But it’ll work in MySQL.
A Solution

Autogenerate that sucker!

@monkeys = Monkey.find(:all,
  :conditions => ['rabid = ?', false])

Yay!
"Starting from scratch" is seductive but disease ridden
-Pithy Advice for Programmers