What is the difference between BIT and TINYINT in MySQL?

Question

In which cases would you use which? Is there much of a difference? Which I typically used by persistence engines to store booleans?

Answer 1

From Overview of Numeric Types;

BIT[(M)]

A bit-field type. M indicates the number of bits per value, from 1 to 64. The default is 1 if M is omitted.

This data type was added in MySQL 5.0.3 for MyISAM, and extended in 5.0.5 to MEMORY, InnoDB, BDB, and NDBCLUSTER. Before 5.0.3, BIT is a synonym for TINYINT(1).

TINYINT[(M)] [UNSIGNED] [ZEROFILL]

A very small integer. The signed range is -128 to 127. The unsigned range is 0 to 255.

Additionally consider this;

BOOL, BOOLEAN

These types are synonyms for TINYINT(1). A value of zero is considered false. Non-zero values are considered true.