Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Unnecessary Error

Time to complain about an annoying feature in an otherwise awesome product: SQL Server Management Studio.

I opened a table today to do some editing of bit field data.  This is your basic Boolean (True/False) column in a database table.  SQL Server itself represents Boolean (bit) data as 0 and 1.

But, SSMS displays "True" and "False" for the field values.  Furthermore, while editing a bit field, it only accepts the words "true" and "false".

So, look at the error that pops up when I try to change a "True" value to false by entering "0" (which, I'll reiterate for clarity, is what SQL Server ITSELF requires for "false"):

StupidError