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

I don't see any advantage in using ENUMS.

They are harder to maintain and don't offer anything that a regular lookup table with proper foreign keys wouldn't allow you to do.