In my 15+ years of web development, there are very few things I can say are unequivocally a good idea. It almost always does depend. Storing timestamps instead of booleans, however, is one of those things I can go out on a limb and say it doesn’t really depend all that much. You might as well timestamp it. There are pl...
  • canpolat@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Good point. However, approaching this problem from “YAGNI” point of view is a bit misleading, I think. If you are not going to need the timestamp, you shouldn’t add it to your code base.

    In my opinion, hastiness is the culprit. When a property appears to be a binary one, we jump to the conclusion to use a boolean way too quickly. We should instead stop and ask ourselves if we are really dealing with a situation that can be reduced to a single bit. The point raised by the article is a good example: you may want to record the state change as timestamp. Moreover, in a lot of the cases, the answer is not even binary. The values for is_published may be, “Yes”, “No” or “I don’t know” (and then we will be too quick to assign null to “I don’t know”). Underlying problem is that we don’t spend enough time when modeling our problems. And this is a sure way of accumulating technical debt.

  • key@lemmy.keychat.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Only really makes any sense for flags that go from false to true and don’t go back often. And even then it has huge semantic cost. How do you distinguish a “boolean timestamp” from an actual timestamp? Is “modified at” a flag indicating a pending modification or a timestamp when it was last modified?

    Much better to just have two columns, so e.g. you can see “enabled” and an 'enabled_date" that indicates when you last enabled/disabled the entity.

    • Domi@lemmy.secnd.meEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Much better to just have two columns, so e.g. you can see “enabled” and an 'enabled_date" that indicates when you last enabled/disabled the entity.

      That sounds good until you realize you now have two sources of truth, do you trust enabled or enabled_date? If you really want to go this route enabled should be a virtual field that checks enabled_date in the background so you can have the boolean semantics but still keep a single field.

      I also used booleans a lot previously but since using Laravel I have come to enjoy the updated_at, created_at and deleted_at fields that it automatically creates and I follow this format as well now if I need more.

  • Jim@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Ehhh, I don’t quite agree with this. I’ve done the same thing where I used a timestamp field to replace a boolean. However, they are technically not the same thing. In databases, boolean fields can be nullable so you actually have 3-valued boolean logic: true, false, and null. You can technically only replace a non-nullable field to a timestamp column because you are treating null in timestamp as false.

    Two examples:

    1. A table of generated documents for employees to sign. There’s a field where they need to agree to something, but it’s optional. You want to differentiate between employees who agreed, employees who disagreed, and employees who have yet to agree. You can’t change the column from is_agreed to agreed_at.

    2. Adding a boolean column to an existing table. These columns need to either default to an value (which is fair) or be nullable.

    • delial@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, this feels like “premature optimization”. When you design your applications and databases, it should reflect your understanding of the problem and how you solved it as best as possible. Using DATETIMEOFFSET NULL when you actually mean BIT NOT NULL isn’t saying what you mean. If you already understand that you have a boolean option and you think you might need a timestamp to track it, use 2 columns. Or an audit table. So sayeth the holy SRP.