Forum Discussion
Character field vs Boolean field
I've got our Power BI tied into a Pervasive DB.
One of the columns in the table is showing blank values. I contacted the dev. of the application what posts to the DB and asked them why its blank, and they said...
"the table has it defined as a character, but it’s really a Boolean. We can’t change it easily because char is 8 bits, Boolean is 1 bit, but is next to another Boolean of 1 bit, which may take 2 bytes or 1 byte and everything else will be out of alignment."
Can someone translate this into English...is there a way to have Power BI display this Boolean record so I can see and use the data? Basically I just need to a Y/N or 1 or 0 to filter my result.
My undertanding is there IS data there Power BI is just not displaying it...
2 Replies
What he's saying is, the field is character data type in their db but they only store one of two values there, for example, "Y" or "N".
I have no experience with pervasive db and powerbi but i think powerbi should be able to handle it. I think you need to see what's happening in the Power Query editor because I see that other fields have Y/N data pulled through succesfully.
..and also, I think the field is a "soft delete" flag, which may mean if there's nothing there, it's an active record. If there is a value in there, the record has been "deleted"
Yea, I'm fairly certain there is nothing there.
In 19,000+ records in that table, there is not one single value in the MarkDeleted column, and I know in the inventory control software there is hundreds.
I went into the query and set the type from "TEXT" to "True/False" and i only get an error for all the records.
I'm kinda stumped.
