Is there a bitfield type field in oracle?

Hello all,

Oracle 10g.

I have a general question here on how best to implement this: We have a table called TRAIN that holds around 10K records of railroad data. A client of ours wants to be able add a field that specifies which of the 365 days of a year the train runs.

I can think of a few ways of doing this:

1. Add 365 fields of varchar2(1), each of which holds a 'Y' or a 'N' entry to state whether the train runs that day.
2. Add a foreign key to an external table that holds unique date ranges.
3. Is there a bitmap-kind of field that could hold one entry in a bit of an integer type. Such things are available to software developers who need to compress the data as much as possible.

I'd appreciate a pointer to the right area here, if (3) is available.

Thanks

Dean Received on Wed Jan 30 2008 - 09:50:51 CST