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unclejemima
Post Patron
Post Patron

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...

 

boolean.JPG

 

 

2 REPLIES 2
HotChilli
Super User
Super User

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.

boolean2.JPG

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