Enums or Tables?

Question

I am making this a community wiki, as I would appreciate people\'s approach and not necessarily an answer.

I am in the situation where I have a lot of lookup type data

Answer 1

I use both. In Linq to SQL and EF, you just make the column property an enum type. In other frameworks you can usually map the column to an enum property somehow. You can still have an primary key table in the database containing valid enums.

You could also do this with a CHECK constraint in the database, but that tends to tie your data to your application - somebody looking at the database alone wouldn't necessarily know what each value means. Therefore I prefer the hybrid table/enum.