Booleans saved as chars rather than int about laravel-oci8 HOT 7 CLOSED

Sorry for grave-digging this :D but I've just stumbled upon this problem myself... I believe the decision behind the boolean -> char mapping was due to Oracle's own AskTom suggestion about using it for storing Y/N values and not because of memory footprint.
Anyway, since the original answer, they changed their stance and suggested to use number fields instead. Localization issues are among the reasons given.
Here's the original discussion and relevant comment

from laravel-oci8.

In fact I might change my request as I've read up why char is used (1 byte rather than 2 for NUMBER). Is it at all possible to convert the data back to a boolean before handing it back to the app or is the type information not known when retrieving it from the database?

from laravel-oci8.

as far as i know, the type is not known after retrieving it from database. I guess you would have to manually convert it to boolean. Or use the Eloquent attribute to convert it to another type when retrieving the values.

from laravel-oci8.

Okay, good thinking, I'll use the eloquent accessors to make it a bool.

I take it that the reason behind using CHAR was the smaller memory footprint then? Thanks for your feedback anyway.

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Just to follow up that eloquent accessors don't really help unless I make pivot models and also there's a number of areas we must use query builders for table joins which means the accessors won't do anything. I'll just have to accept that booleans are chars that need converting.

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for the reason behind using char, will have to check it with JFelder, since he is the original author on blueprint and this is just a fork of his works. :)

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but I do believe that smaller memory footprint would be the reason.

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