MySQL Enum performance advantage?

Question

Is there a performance advantage to using enum in situations where there are only 5-10 different possible values for a field? if not what is the advantage?

Answer 1

ENUMs are represented internally by 1 or 2 bytes, depending on the number of values. If the strings you're storing are larger than 2 bytes and rarely change, then an ENUM is the way to go. Comparison will be faster with an enum and they take up less space on disk, which in turn can lead to faster seek times.

The downside is that enums are less flexible when it comes to adding/removing values.