On the Stovepipe Systems blog there's a new post from Yannick de Lange that suggests using bitwose operations instead of booleans to evaluate an on/off setting.

The naive way of storing many boolean options (in a database) is to create for each option a field and storing a 0 when it is false and 1 when it is true. Which of course works, but adding options will require a new field, which might require creating a compatibility layer for your old data. There is an easier way to do this and it's even more efficient at checking fields.

This brings me to an old topic which I have to explain to all the new people at some point and even once explained not everybody understands how it actually works. So in this post I'm going to explain how to use bitwise operators and how it works internally.

He starts with a common example using the 0/1 storage method and refactors it a bit to use different values that are more compatible with bitwise operations. He includes the usage of this system and how to works to evaluate multiple potential option values.