PDOstatement (MySQL): inserting value 0 into a bit(1) field results in 1 written in table

Question

I\'m using a bit(1) field to store boolean values and writing into the table using PDO prepared statements.

This is the test table:

CREATE TABLE IF N         


        

Answer 1

BIT column is a binary type in mysql (though it's documented as numeric type - that's not precisely true) and I advise to avoid it due to problems with client libraries (which PDO issue proves). You will spare yourself a lot of trouble if you modify type of column to TINYINT(1)

TINYINT(1) will of course consume full byte of storage for every row, but according to mysql docs BIT(1) will do as well.

from: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/storage-requirements.html

bit storage requirement is: approximately (M+7)/8 bytes which suggests that BIT(M) column is also byte-aligned.

Also I found this: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50757

So you could check if following code works as you expect:

$pdo = new PDO("connection string etc") ;
$statement = $pdo->prepare('INSERT INTO `test` (SomeText,TestBool) VALUES (:someText,:testBool)') ;
$statement->bindValue(':someText', "TEST");
$statement->bindValue(':testBool', 0, PDO::PARAM_INT);
$statement->execute();

You may also try with different type hints than PARAM_INT, still even if you make it work I advice to change to TINYINT.