[davidverhasselt]

Hehe, that's creative. But I'd say - if you're making it that complex, just use a boolean column and a timestamp column separately instead, if you really need the timestamp, and make it explicit and simple to understand.

[josho]

And this is why legacy code is such a nightmare. Compound unnecessary optimizations like this over a decade and it’s impossible to understand the data in the DB or how to safely refactor the code without breaking some weird corner case that was handled by using magic values instead of structured data.