I've been using Hibernate for years with mapping Enums to varchar-columns which works fine. Remember to map them with
I'm not trying to map them to varchar columns - I'm trying to map them to columns with postgresql enum types as created by CREATE TYPE, see e.g. http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/datatype-enum.html. The built-in enum types are designed for that purpose, and perform better and more safely than using varchars.
Mapping java enums to a typesafe and efficient version in the db was the main reason I did the work to add native enums to postgresql in the first place - I haven't had a chance to use it recently, and I'm a bit disappointed that it doesn't work out of the box. So I want to fix up whatever parts of the stack are in the way of making that work.
