this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
298 points (99.0% liked)

Programmer Humor

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[–] TootSweet@lemmy.world 60 points 4 days ago (2 children)
create table boolean (
  id integer primary key,
  name text not null unique
)
insert into boolean (name) values ('true');
insert into boolean (name) values ('false');
create table document (
  id integer primary key,
  name text not null unique,
  body text not null,
  is_archived not null integer,
  foreign key (is_archived) references boolean (id)
    on delete cascade
    on update no action
);

Solved.

Bonus: DBAs hate this one weird trick that can free up incredible amounts of disk space by deleting just two rows.

[–] folekaule@lemmy.world 43 points 4 days ago

That on delete cascade is evil. I love it.

[–] Baizey@feddit.dk 21 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Would this make 0 = true and 1 = false?

[–] TootSweet@lemmy.world 31 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You're right, that's way too simple. Definitely need to rotate the booleans daily. For... security. Yeah, security.

[–] RustyNova@lemmy.world 47 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I think you got the wrong caption. It's the world if SQLite supported multiple concurent writes.

Stupid transaction deadlocks...

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 4 days ago (3 children)

In my case, I want to use sqlite locally, for development, but I don't want to add a load of jank to handle booleans for sqlite.

[–] RustyNova@lemmy.world 13 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I use rust's SQLx which map bools to numbers so it must be a problem with your connector maybe

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 4 days ago

Yeah I should probably open an issue.

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

username checks out

so it must be a problem with your connector maybe

or with their programming language

[–] RustyNova@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

I actually started using rust well after picking this username :P

[–] nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That’s what I like about Ruby ORMs. They did all the conversion for you, and you could have SQLite on your dev box, Postgres on the test server and MySQL on the annoying production host that wouldn’t run anything else.

This was 18 years ago though.

[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Are not all ORMs like that? I only used ActiveRecord before fucking off from backend 10 years ago

[–] qevlarr@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

This is sqlite's intended use case. To replace configure files and local data

[–] dan@upvote.au 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

WAL mode makes writes a lot faster, which is sufficient for a bunch of use cases. Writers do still need to wait, but they have to wait for a shorter duration. It's still not the right choice for write-heavy use cases, of course.

[–] RustyNova@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

I'm not actually looking for the speed most of the time, but more about preventing partial writes, so I'm still using it

[–] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 11 points 4 days ago (4 children)

What do you use instead of booleans ? floats ?

[–] MultipleAnimals@sopuli.xyz 43 points 4 days ago (2 children)

strings "true" and "false" ofc like any sane developer

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I got a better one: O for true and N for false.

Seen in production for quite important stuff (payment requests).

O is from Oui, N from Non, of course!

😐🫤

[–] felbane@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This is awful and aweful at the same time.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago

Horrible even.

[–] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 27 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] kubica@fedia.io 32 points 4 days ago (1 children)

it allows for mood changes, some parts of the code can check charAt(0) == 't'others can do val != 'false' just let it flow.

[–] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 23 points 4 days ago (1 children)

lord mary joseph make it stop

[–] sznowicki@lemmy.world 21 points 4 days ago

And for double fun if the output doesn’t matter you can make if endsWith(“e”).

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 4 days ago

Sometimes it's 0 and 1

[–] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Use a CHAR(1) you can then use it as an enumeration.

Don't use T/F for true/false use it for the actual sematic meaning for the thing that the Boolean is toggling. E g. S for subscribed, U for unsubscribed, or whatever.

It also means when you inevitably grow to needing a tri-state it makes sense.

Unless SQLite actually supports enumerations, then just use them

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

I think you could use a CHECK constraint to effectively create en enum

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 4 points 4 days ago

Smallest INT it can support and only ever use 0 and 1.

[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 3 points 4 days ago

But that's IFF.

[–] dalakkin@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

If it just supported sorting by random with a seed..

[–] lambisio@feddit.cl 3 points 4 days ago

I can live without Booleans I think... what saddens me more than nothing else is the lack of more proper treatment for Decimal-like types.