Best Practice for Storing Sets of Options

[wmac]

Hello,

I have always stored sets of options like marital status (i.e. single, married, divorced...), sex, hair color, level of study (i.e. high school diploma, bachelors degree, ...), country etc. in database tables. I would then save an index to the selected option in user's profile table.

Pros:
Admin of the website can easily customize options using a web based interface. While doing the same with files needs more effort.

Cons:
I am sometimes forced to join up to 10 tables (in MySQL) to add those information and produce information pages.

1- What other Cons or Pros you see for above method?

2- How about storing these options in simple PHP arrays and keeping them in a file e.g. "constants.php" and using array indexes in profile tables etc.

Which approach is better in your opinion? Keeping options in file or database?

Thanks.

[knowj]

Personally I used a mix of both depending on what the job is and what the system spec is.

Male, Female are going to remain constant and never change. There is only 2 options so having this in the database would be pointless. A CHAR field called gender within the user table with a value of M or F would suffice and the Male/Female can be held within an array.

However countries is a bit different I store these in a database (usually) allowing the admin to enable/disable countries and other areas of the system to use the data efficiently (shipping, registration etc....)

In my opinion there is no right or wrong answer just whatever is fit for purpose.