Lookup Tables Best Practices: DB Tables… or Enumerations

Question

If we have to store the available positions at a company (i.e. Manager, Team Lead, ... etc). What are the best practices for storing it? I have two opinions with comments...

Answer 1

Is the only thing you are planning on putting into a db this list of employers?

If yes, drop it in a file, and be done with it.

DBs are great, but if you need a simple key-value, they are overkill. They give you a lot of stuff. But they also do a lot of stuff behind the scenes, they are one more thing you need to support... if you can get away with a single file with 20 tab-delimited lines, go with simplicity.

If you have a lot of things that require these kinds of lookups, or if you think you might need to update them while a client is trying to read them, or if you might want to cross-reference things later on -- then go for the DB.