creatingEnum¶

Group style · Since 0.17.0
Diagnostic lint/creatingEnum

Sources: inspired by eugene/W13

Description¶

Creating enum types is not recommended for new applications.

Enumerated types have several limitations that make them difficult to work with in production:

Removing values from an enum requires complex migrations and is not supported directly
Adding values to an enum requires an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock in some Postgres versions
Associating additional data with enum values is impossible without restructuring
Renaming enum values requires careful migration planning

A lookup table with a foreign key constraint provides more flexibility and is easier to maintain.

Examples¶

Invalid¶

CREATE TYPE document_type AS ENUM ('invoice', 'receipt', 'other');

code-block.sql:1:1 lint/creatingEnum ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  ! Creating enum type document_type is not recommended.

  > 1 │ CREATE TYPE document_type AS ENUM ('invoice', 'receipt', 'other');
      │ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    2 │ 

  i Enum types are difficult to modify: removing values requires complex migrations, and associating additional data with values is not possible.

  i Consider using a lookup table with a foreign key constraint instead, which provides more flexibility and easier maintenance.

Valid¶

-- Use a lookup table instead
CREATE TABLE document_type (
    type_name TEXT PRIMARY KEY
);
INSERT INTO document_type VALUES ('invoice'), ('receipt'), ('other');

How to configure¶

{
  "linter": {
    "rules": {
      "creatingEnum": "error"
    }
  }
}

How to suppress¶

Suppress this diagnostic with a comment:

-- pgls-ignore creatingEnum