Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 09:01:00 -0600
From: Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to>
To: Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon@thenilgiris.com>
Cc: "D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <darcy@druid.net>, pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: sql can i substitute
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	"D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <darcy@druid.net>, pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
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	<20041217074257.42a44460.darcy@druid.net>
	<0412171822481N.06834@thenilgiris.com>
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On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 at 18:22:48 +0530,
  Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon@thenilgiris.com> wrote:
> On Friday 17 December 2004 06:12 pm, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> 
> > An alternative to Andreas' suggestion would be to create a simple lookup
> > table and join them.  This is good if the real life example can get
> > larger and/or the list can change and you don't want to modify code
> > every time it does.
> 
> yes, but in this case the list wont change, and i'm trying to port mysql to 
> pgsql without disturbing as far as possible the mysql queries. basically 
> replacing some 'set' and 'enum' datatypes - one table has six of thes, and 
> adding six tables is not on

You might be better off using domains and a constraint to implement
set types. Storing numbers instead of names will save a little space,
but unless you are having some problems with resources, using the strings
directly will be simpler.