Return Boolean Value as TRUE or FALSE in Select (PostgreSQL/pgAdmin)

If all you want to show is the literal TRUE or FALSE, you can use the case statements like you had proposed. Since PostgreSQL treats TRUE, true, yes, on, y, t and 1 as true, I’d control how I’d want the output to look like.

Where clause can be written like:

select * from tablename where active
--or--
select * from tablename where active = true

(My recommendation is the same as PostgreSQL – use true)

When selecting, although there may be hesitation to use the case statements, I’d still recommend doing that to have control over your output string literal.

Your query would look like this:

select 
  case when active = TRUE then 'TRUE' else 'FALSE' end as active_status,
  ...other columns...
from tablename
where active = TRUE;

SQLFiddle example: http://sqlfiddle.com/#!15/4764d/1

create table test (id int, fullname varchar(100), active boolean);
insert into test values (1, 'test1', FALSE), (2, 'test2', TRUE), (3, 'test3', TRUE);

select
  id,
  fullname,
  case when active = TRUE then 'TRUE' else 'FALSE' end as active_status
from test;

| id | fullname | active_status |
|----|----------|---------------|
|  1 |    test1 |         FALSE |
|  2 |    test2 |          TRUE |
|  3 |    test3 |          TRUE |