Problem statement We all want to write clean code and follow best coding practices. This all engineers 'North Star' goal which in many cases can not be easily achievable because of many potential difficulties with converting our ideas/good practices into working solutions. One of an example I recently came across was about using ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework 5 to store Enum values in a relational database (like Azure SQL). Why is this a problem you might ask... and my answer here is that you want to work with Enum types in your code but persist an integer in your databases. You can think about in that way. Why we use data types at all when everything could be just a string which is getting converted into a desirable type when needed. This 'all-string' approach is of course a huge anti-pattern and a bad practice for many reasons with few being: degraded performance, increased storage space, increased code duplication. Pre-requirements 1. Status enum type definition...
Damian Zapart, Principal Engineering Manager @ Microsoft - official blog.