On 11/28/05, Martijn Tonies <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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. Tell me, do you also create your own sequences in MySQL instead of using the AUTO_INCREMENT feature? Because that, too, is an abomination in the same way. I use ENUM a lot, successfully, and when I want to add another ENUM value to a table (I never delete one), I have a script that runs a show table, gets the ENUM field in question, gets all the values, and alters the table modifying the column with the correct values (all the current values + the new one). I've never had a problem with it yet (knock wood). -Sheeri -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
