One more -1 vote for bit masks stored in the database on columns<br>that need to be filtered by. <br><br>+1 on using an int or char(1) for each of the columns would be more <br>effective, since each discrete column can be used in WHEREs, ...etc.<br>
<br>The extra bytes overhead is negligible.<br><br>This is also more portable across databases and does not require <br>database specific functions.<br>