Enum and performance

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My app has a lot of different lookup values, these values don't ever change, e.g. US States. Rather than putting them into database tables, I'd like to use enums.

But, I do realize doing it this way involves having a few enums and a lot of casting from "int" and "string" to and from my enums.

Alternative, I see someone mentioned using a Dictionary<> as a lookup tables, but enum implementation seems to be cleaner.

So, I'd like to ask if keeping and passing around a lot of enums and casting them be a problem to performance or should I use the lookup tables approach, which performs better?

Edit: The casting is needed as ID to be stored in other database tables.

enums casting dictionary performance c#
7 Answers

If the question was "is casting enum faster than accessing a dictionary item?" then the other answers addressing the various aspects of the performance would make sense.

But here the question seems to be "is casting enum when I need to store their value to a database table going to negatively affect the application performance?".

If that is the case, I don't need to run any test to say that storing data in a database table is always going to be orders of magnitude slower than casting an enum or executing its ToString().

In this case I would say the important thing is readability and maintainability of the code. In simple cases enums will do the job cleanly, but I agree with other answers that dictionaries are more flexible in the long term.

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