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by joeyrobert 2651 days ago
Normalizing has similar size benefits. For our use case (big aggregate reporting tables), incoming external data is not normalized, meaning we'd have to have another process iterate over it with foreign table in memory and map it to the foreign key. Enum's can be transparently ingested without this normalization requirement, while taking equivalent space. There's also now one level of indirection between the column and its value. Both are fine.