My colleagues are not averse to adding another table or column. They also try to get the type as forward-compatible as is practical. Usually that means a new table plus a lookup. At least because they're not really used to MySQL we get a slightly atypical POV on the problem. Which I approve.

The biggest problem is handling brain-dead decisions made by previous programmers that are a PITA to fix. (Like using a TEXT field instead VARCHAR. And the table is 19 million rows. And ALTER TABLE on that in MySQL takes hours. We can't have the site down that long...)

Just don't get me started on JDBC rules. (Sometimes I hate Java nulls.)

Wade.