Comment by anyfoo

That’s ubiquitous in slightly lower level programming (pretty much every non-small C program probably does it in some way or other), but the problem with doing that in this database scenario is that you might run into atomicity issues.

To toggle a flag, you have to read the column, modify it, and write it back. If someone else does that to another flag at the same time, there’s a race that one of you might win, at the expense of the other flag’s new value.

Unless you employ a lock that would otherwise not be necessary.