enums

If people would like to play, I have created a little kit to help in 
creating first class enum types in a few seconds. It works something 
like this:
   make TYPENAME=rainbow ENUMS=' "red", "orange", "yellow", "green", 
"blue", "indigo", "violet" '   make TYPENAME=rainbow install   psql -f /path/to/contrib/rainbow-install.sql yourdb

and you are done. Now you can do:
   create table foo( r rainbow);   insert into foo values('red');   select 'red'::rainbow < 'green'::rainbow; <--
yieldstrue   select rainbow_order('yellow');  <-- yields 2
 

The kit is at  http://developer.postgresql.org/~adunstan/enumkit.tgz

Needs 8.0 or later, since it use PGXS.

Maximum number of values is 32767 - but if you use that many you're 
insane anyway :-)

I did this as part of thinking about how we might do enums properly. AS 
Chris KL recently noted - it is very often asked for. So this is not the 
end of the road, just a tiny step at the beginning.

cheers

andrew