Bug #8485 BOOLEAN: Silent data type change to TINYINT
Submitted: 13 Feb 2005 0:40 Modified: 29 Sep 2008 21:29
Reporter: Trudy Pelzer Email Updates:
Status: Verified Impact on me:
None 
Category:MySQL Server: Data Types Severity:S3 (Non-critical)
Version:5.0.3-alpha-debug OS:Linux (SuSE 9.1)
Assigned to: Assigned Account CPU Architecture:Any

[13 Feb 2005 0:40] Trudy Pelzer 
Description:
MySQL should never change the data type of a column.
But in the case of BOOLEAN column definitions, the server
changes the data type to TINYINT.

How to repeat:
mysql> create table t1 (col1 boolean);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> show create table t1;
+-------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Table | Create Table                                                                                |
+-------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| t1    | CREATE TABLE `t1` (
  `col1` tinyint(1) default NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 |
+-------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
-- This is incorrect. The data type chosen for the column was
BOOLEAN and this should be reflected in the SHOW statement.
[13 Feb 2005 2:12] MySQL Verification Team 
Thank you for the bug report.
[29 Sep 2008 21:29] Konstantin Osipov 
No reason to keep this not fixed.
[10 Jun 2009 11:23] Susanne Ebrecht 
Bug #22361 and bug #45181 are duplicates of this bug here.
[17 Aug 2009 3:01] Susanne Ebrecht 
Bug #46734 is set as duplicate of this bug here
[19 Oct 2009 10:44] Susanne Ebrecht 
Bug #38154 is depending on this bug here.
[26 Feb 2010 6:27] Susanne Ebrecht 
Bug #51491 is a duplicate of this bug here.
[22 Apr 2010 19:55] shimon doodkin 
quote "Severity:	S3 (Non-critical)"

actually it is very critical

for adaptation of mysql as a replacement for 

ms access and any other database for vb
[23 Apr 2010 6:56] Kai Sautter 
Implementation of this feature would be highly desirable to improve interoperability with third-party tools as well as to make a true Boolean data type available to application programmers (reducing the need for cast operations in applications).

If native implementation is taking too much effort, an implementation using a "wrapper" data type (wrapping and restricting the actual storage data type TINYINT to (optionally) change its external visibility to BOOLEAN) would probably be sufficient to start with.
[5 Dec 2011 15:16] Peter Laursen 
Once a SQL99 compliant BOOLEAN gets implemented please als oconsider http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=63583
[11 Nov 2017 21:21] Federico Razzoli 
Still in 8.0.3.