Well, we don't know if his company is an international company. They may only make an English version of the product and only sell to clients in the US. Also, the author did say in a later post that they store the text value of enums as strings.
malharone wrote:
Though he wants me to textualize enums and store their text values as strings instead of storing the numeric representation.
jschell wrote:
Except the OP suggested that enums are stored as numerics. So those don't show up in reports?
Actually, the author said this in a latter post:
malharone wrote:
Though he wants me to textualize enums and store their text values as strings instead of storing the numeric representation.
Since he wants him to stored the text values as strings, this would fall inline with the requirements of easy to read reports.
jschell wrote:
And certainly reporting tools in general allow values to be mapped either in SQL itself or even in the the supported report language so that wouldn't seem to be a problem to me.
His company may require their customers to write their own reports. They may even provide some basic reporting utility to do this that might not have some of the advanced functions of Crystal or some of the other advanced reporting engines. Its a lot easier for a novice user to drag a field onto a report than have to resort to advanced features like functions to map a bit value to a readable format. The point I was trying to make is that we don't know the circumstances that already exist in this situation. There could be many reasons why someone would need to use a char datatype rather than a bit.
Wow, I think firing someone or leaving your job is a little overkill for this problem. I think you might have to look at this from the DBA or even the customer's point of view. I have no idea what the boolean field will be used for, but if the software your designing is the only thing accessing it, then you probably have a valid argument. However, if this field will be accessed from multiple applications - Crystal Reports, SQL Reporting Services, Analysis Services, Some Web App, etc.. - then you have to think about how it will look in those reports and applications. From your point of view, a 0 and 1 is pretty straight forward. However, from the customer's point a view a 0 or 1 does not look nice in a report. You have to take a step back and look at the big picture. Does the performance increase of using a binary datatype outweigh the readability of the data? How many rows of data are you expecting and how often will this field be accessed? These are all questions you need to ask. Speak with your DBA, if he has been there longer than you, he may know the reasons for doing it that way. Maybe the rest of you need to think through situations a bit more before jumping to conclusions based on so little information. I suppose its just too easy to judge people. -- modified at 11:10 Tuesday 11th September, 2007