Is it worth the trouble to use tinyint instead of int for SqlServer lookup tables?

Question

When designing a lookup table (enum) in SqlServer 2005, if you know the number of entries will never get very high, should you use tinyint instead of int? I\'m most concerned a

Answer 1

I doubt that using smallint instead of int is going to have much performance benefit except in rare edge cases. You can easily build a test app for this though, create some test tables and do a million inserts/updates/selects and compare performance.