I want to store a user's gender in a database with as little (size/performance) cost as possible.

So far, 3 scenarios come to mind

  1. Int - aligned with Enum in code (1 = Male, 2 = Female, 3 = ...)
  2. char(1) - Store m, f or another single character identifier
  3. Bit (boolean) - is there an appropriate field name for this option?

The reason I ask is because of this answer which mentions that chars are smaller than booleans.

I should clarify that I'm using MS SQL 2008, which DOES in fact have the bit datatype.

sql database-design
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