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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T09:13:49+00:00

I have a bunch of boolean options for things like acceptable payment types which

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I have a bunch of boolean options for things like “acceptable payment types” which can include things like cash, credit card, cheque, paypal, etc. Rather than having a half dozen booleans in my DB, I can just use an integer and assign each payment method an integer, like so

PAYMENT_METHODS = (
    (1<<0, 'Cash'),
    (1<<1, 'Credit Card'),
    (1<<2, 'Cheque'),
    (1<<3, 'Other'),
)

and then query the specific bit in python to retrieve the flag. I know this means the database can’t index by specific flags, but are there any other drawbacks?

Why I’m doing this: I have about 15 booleans already, split into 3 different logical “sets”. That’s already a lot of fields, and using 3 many-to-many tables to save a bunch of data that will rarely change seems inefficient. Using integers allows me to add up to 32 flags to each field without having to modify the DB at all.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you could limit your use case to one or more sets of values that can only have one bit true at a time, perhaps you could use enums in your database. You would get the best of both worlds, maintainable like btreat notes, and still smaller (and simpler) than several booleans.

    Since that’s not possible, I’d agree with your initial assment and go with a bitfield. I would use/create a bitfield wrapper however, so that in your code you don’t deal with flipping and shifting bits directly – that becomes difficult to maintain and debug, as btreat says – but instead deal with it like a list or dictionary and convert to/from a bitfield when needed.

    Some commentary on enums/bitfields in Django

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