Tinyint VS Bit

What is the difference between BIT and TINYINT in MySQL?

A TINYINT is an 8-bit integer value, a BIT field can store between 1 bit, BIT(1), and 64 bits, BIT(64). For a boolean values, BIT(1) is pretty common.

BIT(1) or TINYINT for flags in MySQL

if you use a mysql version greater then 5.0.3 Bit isn't anymore an alias for Tinyint but if you create a bit column it gets anyway 1 Byte.

so use Bit(1) or Tinyint(1) is equal and you get no benefits if your table had only 1 Bit column.

but if you had more true/false columns i suggest you to use Bit as each value of the bit columns are placed in the same 1 Byte until it is filled.

if u use mysql lower then 5.0.3 then use tinyint or bit is totally fine. if you look at the mysql documentation on bool types you see that it is a alias for tinyint

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/numeric-type-overview.html

BOOL, BOOLEAN

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

BIT is a synonym for TINYINT(1).

MySQL TINYINT(1) versus BIT(1)

A TINYINT will always have a size of one (1) byte. And accept values between -128 and 127 (if signed).

The number you put in the brackets is for display purposes.

A BIT(1) on the other hand only take one bit in storage but needs to be aligned to whole bytes, meaning that if you only have one BIT(1) column, one byte is used, but if you have multiple they can be placed in the same byte.

MySQL: BOOLEAN (aka tinyint(1)) vs BIT

tinyint(1) is an integer type with a defined display width of 1. The BIT data type represents bit-field values which can have from 1 to 64 bits.

The storage size of tinyint is always 1 byte while the storage size of BIT(n) is approximately INT((n+7)/8) bytes

You can write to a BIT field using a special notation e.g. b'1111', don't think you can use this with INT/TINYINT fields

What is the difference between bit(1) and tinyint(1) in mysql

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.

TINYINT(m)

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

See Numeric Type Overview

SQL Server 2008: tinyint vs bit

The problem in 2000 was a bit couldn't be part of an index. Which is logical since a bit only has two states. It is a very poor field to have on an index. In 2005 you can create covered indexes, which allows you to specify extra pieces of data to store with the index. This allows you to avoid a bookmark lookup.

I would go with the bit.

Is BIT field faster than int field in SQL Server?

Officially bit will be fastest, especially if you don't allow nulls. In practice it may not matter, even at large usages. But if the value will only be 0 or 1, why not use a bit? Sounds like the the best way to ensure that the value won't get filled with invalid stuff, like 2 or -1.