In article <24cb9b4b0511280847h5d4fbd73x10e94d06b3065aa3@stripped>,
sheeri kritzer <awfief@stripped> writes:
> On 11/28/05, Martijn Tonies <m.tonies@stripped> wrote:
>>
>> > Part of me agrees with you, on a "Pure SQL level". but then why would
>> > anyone ever use ENUM or SET?
>>
>> I wouldn't :-)
>>
>> IMO, they're abominations that are to be avoided.
> Again, part of me agrees with you. But part of me, particularly the
> part that says "our queries need to be optimized as much as possible,
> so our customers will be happy," thinks that ENUM and SET are
> non-standard, MySQL specific ways to create normalized data without
> having an extra table, and thus an extra join, and thus more
> computation, and thus a slower query.
I'd say SET is a denormalization which might give you some performance
(at the price of being completely nonstandard), but ENUM is just
syntactical sugar for a TINYINT column.
