alt Hacker NewsIt's way better to just use a DBMS that supports enums. I know SQL server isn't one of those but I still don't store my coded values as strings.
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SigmundA • today at 11:59 AM
How do you store them? Also enums are not user configurable normally. It would be a good feature to have them, but they don't work well in many cases.
Typical code tables with code, description and anything else needed for that value which the user can configure in the app.
Sure you can use integers instead of codes, now all your results look like 1, 2, 3, 4 for all your coded columns when trying to debug or write ad-hoc stuff. Also ints are not variable length so your wasting space for short codes and you have to know ahead time if its only going to be 1,2,4 or 8 bytes.
The way to do enums in SQL (generally, not just MSSQL) is another table. It's better that they don't offer several ways to do the same thing.