I will go on record as strongly disagreeing with the stuff espoused by the Enums article (and even more strongly with using CLR to implement them). Comments cost nothing to implement. Using a (var)CHAR ANYTHING is going to be less efficient (significantly as the length increases) than using a tiny/small/int as a surrogate key. I have a client that uses varchar(20)s for a lot of CLUSTERED PKs and their performance is horrid. Indexes are very inefficient too.