title: Rails 4.1 - Write to MySQL database without typecasting
body: <p>I have a column in my MySQL database which is of type TINYINT(1). I need to store actual integers in this column. The problem is, because of the column type, Rails 4.1 assumes this column contains only boolean values, so it typecasts all values besides 0 or 1 to be 0 when it writes to the database.</p>
  
  <p>I don't want to simply disable boolean emulation since we have a number of columns in our database where we use TINYINT(1) to actually represent a boolean value. And I am currently not able to change the column types in MySQL.</p>
  
  <p>How can I force Rails 4.1 to bypass the typecasting step and write directly to the database instead?</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>(This excerpt from the Rails 4.1 source may be of some use: <a href="https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/4-1-stable/activerecord/lib/active_record/attribute_methods/write.rb" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/4-1-stable/activerecord/lib/active_record/attribute_methods/write.rb</a>)</p>