Quoting woes

[rolfs42]

Dear All,
I have a legacy Database that has a table that has a primary key that is a varchar(20). Problem is that 99% of the values in that primary key column are integers and the queries regarding this table (there's a hasMany() from another model) show up in my slow log as queries not using indexes.
I have examined the issue and what is happening is, that Model A is retrieved and has a primary key of 1234. Then the hasMany is followed and a
select from B where primarykey = 1234 is built and executed.
And mysql would only use the index if data types match, so the query should be (in my case!)
select from B where primarykey = '1234'.

I tracked it down to the function
public function bindValues($statement, $bindings)
in lluminate/Database/Connection.php where only if the bound value is an int, PDO::PARAM_INT is passed down to the corresponding quoting functions:
is_int($value) ? PDO::PARAM_INT : PDO::PARAM_STR
Would it make sense to make this somehow configurable?

Sure, the db design is to blame but as I said, it's a legacy. During digging into the issue I've found some posts on stackexchange with a similar setting.

Or is there already some sort of workaround?

Tia, RS