i know i know this database term, i just can't for the life of me remember it

Question

i've been trying to rack my brain for this term but I just can't think of it. The description of it is as follows...

say I have a database in which a column is the day of the week and it contains plain text days of the week (ie Monday, Tuesday etc).

in order to make this column analyzable, I want to convert each day of the week to a number (so for all entries that have Monday it would change to 1, for those that are Tuesday it would change to 2 etc).

could anyone share some knowledge on what the term is I'm talking about?

Thanks alot.

"ordinal", "enumeration", "index", "reference"? – sje397 Aug 01 '11 at 05:51 — sje397, Aug 01 '11 at 05:51
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/enum.html ? – Legolas Aug 01 '11 at 05:55 — Legolas, Aug 01 '11 at 05:55

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 01 '11 at 05:56

3

creating a numbered list is called enumeration.

define enumeration:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=define+enumeration

and just for good measure (how it plays into set theory and combinatorics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumeration

answered Aug 01 '11 at 05:56

this_is_will

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enumeration it was, thanks all :) – cougs85 Aug 01 '11 at 05:58

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:47

1

Yes, this seems like a good candidate for an enum(Enumerations )
Also we have a ENUM datatypes available for lot of database providers.

For ex :
MySQL does support ENUM and Oracle doesn't support ENUM at all.

you can get more information on this from this stack overflow post also.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:47

Community

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answered Aug 01 '11 at 06:03

Sandeep Pathak

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i know i know this database term, i just can't for the life of me remember it

2 Answers2