16 messages in com.mysql.lists.mysqlRe: Seeking Opinions
FromSent OnAttachments
Robb Kerr25 Nov 2005 08:59 
SGr...@unimin.com25 Nov 2005 10:01 
Rhino25 Nov 2005 10:16 
Johan25 Nov 2005 10:44 
Hal Vaughan25 Nov 2005 10:53 
Robb Kerr25 Nov 2005 12:43 
Johan25 Nov 2005 16:16 
sheeri kritzer28 Nov 2005 06:53 
SGr...@unimin.com28 Nov 2005 07:10 
sheeri kritzer28 Nov 2005 07:13 
Martijn Tonies28 Nov 2005 07:25 
sheeri kritzer28 Nov 2005 08:35 
Martijn Tonies28 Nov 2005 08:39 
sheeri kritzer28 Nov 2005 08:47 
Martijn Tonies28 Nov 2005 11:31 
Harald Fuchs29 Nov 2005 02:27 
Subject:Re: Seeking Opinions
From:Harald Fuchs (hf09@protecting.net)
Date:11/29/2005 02:27:44 AM
List:com.mysql.lists.mysql

In article <24cb@mail.gmail.com>, sheeri kritzer <awf@gmail.com> writes:

On 11/28/05, Martijn Tonies <m.to@upscene.com> 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.