[DUG] Using Boolean (Char(1)) in Firebird

[Steve Peacocke]

Hi all,

I'm playing around with a Firebird database and wanted to know from you DB
experts out there how you handle booleans in a table.

These could be as simple as
  ActiveRecord (Y/N)
  AccountTransactionType (I/E) - (Income or Expense)

That last I would normally think would be "Income (Y/N)" so that would be a
boolean too.

My understanding is that this will never be indexed, even if you
specifically add an index to it. So how do you handle it. There may be
several boolean fields in a table definition.

As these tables c an contain several hundred thousand records, this could
potentially slow down any query to say total all records last 3 years where
Active and Income - as the only index would then be on the date field,
there is a possibility that this could potentially be a very slow query.

I've heard of others creating another table to create, say, non-Avtive
record ID's, but this one table could have several booleans, therefore
creating several new tables (combining then into a single table with the
field name would cause the same problem).

Any thoughts?

Steve Peacocke
Mobile: +64 220 612-611
Linkedin Professional
Profile<http://nz.linkedin.com/pub/steve-peacocke/1/a06/489>
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