As dustismo says, you can represent booleans as tinyint(1) in mysql, which is more readable with browsers, I've found. But you have to specify the columnDefinition attribute of @Column (if you're using hibernate's schema creation coolness), and so you might loose some portability. It'd probably be better to specify it in an orm.xml file. I haven't done this yet (I'm using the default bits); but I think I will at some point. If anyone else has found a great way to work with booleans, please chime in. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4089024#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...