Can I have negative tinyint in SQLite?

Question

Hi, I need to create a table (in SQLite) with a column which contains either "-1" or "+1". To save memory it is better not to use "int" as a type of the column. So, I thought about "smallint" and "tinyint". But smallint is not so small (from -32,768 to 32,767) and tinyint can be only positive (from 0 to 255). Are there any other options or I have select between these twp?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

If your field can have only two values in it, why not use a bit/boolean?

Answer 2

Boolean would do the job with a tiny processing in the application to map boolean to -1 or +1.

Answer 3

I recommend you do as other answers suggest and use 0/1 or a bit instead, but if you really really need to do this, Can you in your code, cast the value from a unsigned byte to a char, and then to a signed byte? If you can, then Then 1 (00000001) casts to 1, and 255 (11111111) casts to -1

Answer 4

SQLite 3 presents only an INTEGER data type which...

[...] is a signed integer, stored in 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8 bytes depending on the magnitude of the value.

Source: http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html