As you probably know, boolean values in software systems represent the states “true” or “false”. For some use cases in a software application, you may need a lot of them.
To give you a very simplified example, imagine a form where the user can check which languages he or she speaks:
Let’s assume that every language option should be stored as a boolean value in a “users” database table, being either “true” or “false”, depending on which of the boxes are checked.
Technically, modern relational database systems such as MySQL can handle many columns per table just fine. However, adding new columns to a table while the database is on load is not that easy if the table already has millions of rows. This is a change that could take hours to complete, depending on the database system and data size. Additionally, there are limits of how many columns can be stored in [...]
