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Notes on boolean columns in database schemas (#10164)
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richvdh authored Jun 11, 2021
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1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions changelog.d/10164.misc
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Add some developer documentation about boolean columns in database schemas.
42 changes: 42 additions & 0 deletions docs/development/database_schema.md
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Expand Up @@ -93,3 +93,45 @@ Ensure postgres is installed, then run:

NB at the time of writing, this script predates the split into separate `state`/`main`
databases so will require updates to handle that correctly.

## Boolean columns

Boolean columns require special treatment, since SQLite treats booleans the
same as integers.

There are three separate aspects to this:

* Any new boolean column must be added to the `BOOLEAN_COLUMNS` list in
`scripts/synapse_port_db`. This tells the port script to cast the integer
value from SQLite to a boolean before writing the value to the postgres
database.

* Before SQLite 3.23, `TRUE` and `FALSE` were not recognised as constants by
SQLite, and the `IS [NOT] TRUE`/`IS [NOT] FALSE` operators were not
supported. This makes it necessary to avoid using `TRUE` and `FALSE`
constants in SQL commands.

For example, to insert a `TRUE` value into the database, write:

```python
txn.execute("INSERT INTO tbl(col) VALUES (?)", (True, ))
```

* Default values for new boolean columns present a particular
difficulty. Generally it is best to create separate schema files for
Postgres and SQLite. For example:

```sql
# in 00delta.sql.postgres:
ALTER TABLE tbl ADD COLUMN col BOOLEAN DEFAULT FALSE;
```

```sql
# in 00delta.sql.sqlite:
ALTER TABLE tbl ADD COLUMN col BOOLEAN DEFAULT 0;
```

Note that there is a particularly insidious failure mode here: the Postgres
flavour will be accepted by SQLite 3.22, but will give a column whose
default value is the **string** `"FALSE"` - which, when cast back to a boolean
in Python, evaluates to `True`.

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