Boolean field nullable problem

[Ivan Smahin]

Hi Jon,

> On Jul 20, 2015, at 11:25 PM, jda <jda at his.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Ruslan,
> 
> I just upgraded from 5.5.2 to the current release (5.8.6 I think) and of course it broke some of my code.
> 
> I have a boolean field that I add to the database like this
> 
>     ALTER TABLE bibAndDoc ADD forCitation Boolean
> 
> In the past I’ve done queries for “forCitation=false”. Worked fine.
> 
> But in 5.8.6 these queries return nothing. I look in Valentina Studio and see that this is a nullable field. If I search for IS NULL I get hits. Is this a bug? I don’t want the field to be nullable (it’s a boolean). And if it is for some reason, I want the search for FALSE to find fields that are not TRUE. This is how it always worked.
> 
> Is this a bug I should report. I don’t want to change my searches to look for NULL or false…
> 

Indeed, a long time any boolean field was not nullable always. But we consider it is wrong because NULL is sort of "unknown" value - it differs from true or false. If you need true/false values only you should make that field "not nullable". Something like this:

ALTER TABLE t1 ADD f1 Boolean NOT NULL;



-- 
Best regards,
Ivan Smahin
Senior Software Engineer
Paradigma Software, Inc
Valentina - The Ultra-Fast Database
http://www.valentina-db.com