Re: Regarding BITs vs. INTs

Stephan Szabo wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Bill Moran wrote:
>
>>I hadn't really looked at this until I started having problems with it.
>>
>>For those who haven't been following along, I'm converting an application
>>originally written in MSSQL to Postgres.
>>
>>I'm a little startled by how BIT fields are handled differently.  Apparently,
>>MSSQL converts freely between BIT and INT.  Those who know, already know that
>>Postgres doesn't do this.
>
> No, but IIRC, it does allow casts between them, it just requires that you
> explicitly mark that you want to cast the value.  If you really want to,
> you could consider changing those casts into implicit casts and see if
> that does what you want.

True, and originally that's what I was doing to fix it.  For example:

CASE bir_returning_function() WHEN 1 THEN ...

was being changed to:

CASE bit_returning_function() WHEN 1::BIT THEN ...

But, the reason I've stopped to reconsider is the fact that it will take a lot
longer to change all the places that bit_returning_function() is used than it
will to just convert big_returing_function() to return an INT.  Some of these
functions are used 20 or 30 different places.

Thanks for the feedback

--
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com