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Coda Hale lives in Berkeley, CA, where he writes about Ruby on Rails, usability, web design and development, and the occasional bit about bicycles.

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!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 4:10pm and is filed under Programming, Ruby and Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

20th Apr 2006 4:10pm Programming Ruby and Rails
 

One Response to “On booleans and database portability”

  1. Peter Says:
    April 21st, 2006 at 8:38am

    Good tip. Database-specific implementations are killing me right about now, I would kill for a truly standard data interface language and minimal featureset (why, oh why would any database in its right mind create transaction capability before implementing resutset intersections?)