Criteria for creating a new category table

[JHizzle]

Here's my quandry: I am creating a new table that's holding records of message sent within the system. One of the fields is what type of message is being sent which currently falls into only 3 options. Currently, it's likely that this is not going to change that much but I'm trying to work out if it's better to create a new table to hold these and thus enforce referential integrity or simply not bother and rely on the enumeration on the code end. Queries against the data is likely to want grouping by message type but with only 3, it just seems a bit overkill. Any suggestions?

[David Mujica]

From a purist standpoint, it would be better to create a parent table like: MessageType ID int, Description Varchar and create a constraint against your Message Table to ensure that only valid message types are created in your table. You won't pay much (if any) performance penalty because your parent table is so small. That's my vote. :cool: