Mysql: enum confusion - sql

Question

I have an employee table, employee has interests, so the table can be designed like this:
create table emp(
id int(10) not null auto_increment,
name varchar(30),
interest varchar(50),
primary key(id)
);
or this:
create table emp(
id int(10) not null auto_increment,
name varchar(30),
interest enum('football','basketball','music','table tennis','volleyball'),
primary key(id)
);
The number of interests can be about 50.
How should i design the table? Should i use enum or others ?
Edit:
Thanks for your reponse.
Assume that a person can be a Mr. or Madame or Ms.
I make a drop down list in PHP.
<select name="role">
<option value="Mr.">Mr.</option>
<option value="Ms">Ms</option>
<option value="Madame">Madame</option>
</select>
And for the DB part, I can do this:
create table emp(
id int(10) not null auto_increment,
name varchar(30),
role varchar(50),
primary key(id)
);
or this:
create table emp(
id int(10) not null auto_increment,
name varchar(30),
role enum('Mr.','Ms.','Madame'),
primary key(id)
);
In this context, which is better?

Answer 1

There's a third option, creating an additional table for holding the interest values.
INTERESTS
interest_id, int, primary key
interest_value, string/varchar, unique constraint (to stop duplicates)
Many-to-Many Relationship?
However, if you want to support an employee having multiple interests you'll need a third table. This is a many-to-many relationship - the third table would sit between the EMPLOYEES and INTERESTS tables, and have foreign key relationships with both.
EMPLOYEE_INTERESTS
employee_id, primary key, foreign key to EMPLOYEES.id
interest_id, primary key, foreign key to INTERESTS.interest_id
One-to-Many Relationship?
If an EMPLOYEES record can only ever have one INTEREST, then you only need to update the EMPLOYEES.interest column to have a foreign key relationship with the INTERESTS table.
EMPLOYEES
interest_id, primary key, foreign key to INTERESTS.interest_id

Answer 2

You should really make 3 tables, assuming that an employee can have multiple interests. (Your current design limits each employee to 1 interest.) Something like this:
Employee (emp)
-------
id
name
Interest
-------
id
description
Employee_Interest
--------
employeeID
interestID
Regarding the edit, I'd say the enum is the better of your 2 examples as it limits you to predetermined allowable values. But many would argue that you should make a lookup table (Role with id and description) even for that