Actually, the indexes start @ 1 (0 signifies there was a data validation error). How is that for tricky

The length of the ENUM value doesn’t matter much (unless you are approaching the table definition limit)…the ENUM “index” is what is stored.

In other words, if you were to insert a value into an ENUM column, but instead of the actual value, insert the index (for instance, 0 for the first item, or 1 for the second item), you would notice that once you’ve viewed the table, you would see the expected value listed.

This is great for performance; however, it can lead to some very subtle bugs if you aren’t aware of what is actually going on.

and also

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE c.city FROM states s LEFT JOIN cities_join c ON (s.id = c.state_id) WHERE s.name=’Minnesota’ LIMIT 10000,5;

since your searching by state maybe if you place it at the left mysql would search for that first and then search for the cities with similar state_id, and it will be ordered automatically.

ENUM is what got me to this blog, but since you guys said its dangerous, it’s no longer in my options.

I think using the 4th way depends on the application. On our case, we store this kind of information in TINYINT and do the work in application, as we only select 25 of them at once. But when selecting thousands of row, and making change in all of them may not be better than storing in ENUM or varchar. I’ll do some tests about this when I have time and post here.