Re: Question on simulating Enum Data type

On Mar 18, 2005, at 11:18, Morgan Kita wrote:

> However, I am a little concerned about performance in that case. If I
> use domain constraints and keep the choices as strings then a string
> comparison will be done whenver I query on this field right? I know an
> index will speed this up quite a bit but even so I may have to do 10s
> of thousands of string compares if there are only 5 choices right?
>
> Ideally wouldn't it be better to store an integer field in the tables,
> and then keep a seperate small map table? Then the application could
> use the map table to look up the key and then do a query on the large
> table using only integer compares?
>
> Am I just being silly or am I not understanding something here? Maybe
> there is another way to do this?

What you've described are the two common ways to approach this
situation. To accurately know which will be performant in your
situation, I think you'll need to run benchmarks on your system. I
don't know whether any such comparison has been done as a reference.
(Yours could be a good one :) Perhaps someone else out there might have
experience with this or knowledge of the backend and chime in.

Michael Glaesemann
grzm myrealbox com