[hn_throwaway_99]

Just wanted to let you know I really appreciate your comments. I hadn't thought about doing it the way you recommend (in my mind I was thinking "oh, storing enum values as text will be inefficient", but I never did the math as you did to realize storing anything up to 8 chars is no worse than bigint), but I think it's a pretty optimal solution. I also checked my DB where we heavily use enums, and basically every enum text value that is longer than 8 characters could easily be shortened/abbreviated to 8 chars and still be very easily understood. Thanks very much!