SQL: Advantages of an ENUM vs. a one-to-many relationship?

Question

I very rarely see ENUM datatypes used in the wild; a developer almost always just uses a secondary table that looks like this:

CREATE TABLE officer_ranks (
id in         


        

Answer 1

Advantages:

• Type safety for stored procedures: will raise a type error if argument can not be coerced into the type. Like: select court_martial('3LT') would raise a type error automatically.

• Custom coalition order: In your example, officers could be sorted without a ranking id.