I need the most clean and efficient solution for my case. I'm trying to store Marks of student in a MySQL DB. A student may be "ABSENT" or "COPY CASE", I want to store such info also in DB.

I thought of assigning codes for above case like -1 for ABSENT, -2 for COPY CASE, etc. This codes will be stored in Marks column only.

More ever, while reading them with a select query, I should get their display values i.e. ABSENT, COPY CASE, etc only.

Can all these be achieved at DB end only?

Or do I need to implement these things at Application level only?

Are there any API's available for Java for such functionality?

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