Re: ENUM vs DOMAIN vs FKyed loookup table

From: Chris Browne <cbbrowne(at)acm(dot)org>
To: pgsql-sql(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: ENUM vs DOMAIN vs FKyed loookup table
Date: 2009-04-15 16:43:07
Message-ID: 87y6u1hnqc.fsf@dba2.int.libertyrms.com
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jasen(at)xnet(dot)co(dot)nz (Jasen Betts) writes:
> On 2009-04-12, Dirk Jagdmann <jagdmann(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>> When you need to choose between enum types, domain types or lookup
>>> tables with foreign keys, what do you usualy choose?
>>
>> When I have a column with valid values that I know when writing my
>> tables and that will *never* change I use an enum. For example a
>> human gender type (and remember that there are 4 values for human
>> sex if you want to model it completely).
>
> "lambda moo" has even more genders than that.

I'm not so sure about that...

I suspect what you're thinking of are "Spivak pronouns," which aren't
indication of gender... Instead, they represent a way of declining to
indicate gender.

It appears that what LambdaMOO has is not a larger number of genders,
but rather a large number of ways to *indicate* gender, some of which
(e.g. - Spivak pronouns) actually decline to do so.

This is more or less equivalent to setting TZ/PGTZ or LC_LANGUAGE to
get the system to output values in some format that you prefer.

It may be that LambdaMOO has some ways to indicate sexual preferences,
but sexual preferences are not the same thing as gender.
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