separations of types and relations should be limited to core atomic type, string, int , date etc ... (althought date is debatable as is not usually atomic in most cases, and many dbs end up with one more date relations)
anyway, always use a table .. when its a choice
Data should be data, queryable, relational. So often I have had to change enums into lookup tables - or worse, duplicate them into lookup tables - because now we need other information attached to the values. Labels, descriptions, colors, etc.
My biggest recommendation though is that if you have a lookup table like this, make the value you would have made an enum not just unique, but _the primary key_. Now all the places that you would be putting an ID have the value just like they would with an enum, and oftentimes you wont need to join. The FK makes sure its valid. The other information is a join away if you need it.
I do wish though that there were more ways to denote certain tables as configuration data vs domain data, besides naming conventions or schemas.
Edit to add: I will say there is one places where I have begrudgingly used enums and thats where we have used something like prisma to get typescript types from the schema. It is useful to have types generated for these values. Of course you can do your own generation of those values based on data, but there is a fundamental difference there between "schema" and "data".
"hello world" ? where #chars != " " == ["h", "e", ...]
sublinear•47m ago
In a lot of web apps this need tends to be related to validation, so many just do these lookups and simple comparisons in their app logic and based on static values from config files long before any db query is made. Sometimes you just don't need to involve the database and the performance would be better for it anyway.