Is there a performance advantage to using enum in situations where there are only 5-10 different possible values for a field? if not what is the advantage?
Is there a performance advantage to using enum in situations where there are only
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Is there a performance advantage to using enum in situations where there are only 5-10 different possible values for a field? if not what is the advantage?
There is a huge performance penalty to using
ENUMfor operations such as:Query the list of permitted values in the
ENUM, for instance to populate a drop-down menu. You have to query the data type fromINFORMATION_SCHEMA, and parse the list out of a BLOB field returned.Alter the set of permitted values. It requires an
ALTER TABLEstatement, which locks the table and may do a restructure.I’m not a fan of MySQL’s
ENUM. I prefer to use lookup tables. See also my answer to ‘How to handle enumerations without enum fields in a database?‘