i have a ENUM column with some values (today 248 distinct values)

i see that in a near future i will have more than 65535 different values inside this enum column, the first solution is change it to varchar, but my problem will be data size

the enum is very optimized in size, a char is 'converted' to a smallint value

my second solution is a int column, and a external table with int/text values, but here i need to change apps, i don't want the second one, but i don't want a very big database (char column)

how could i change the limit of enum size? 

maybe a new enum2 type? with a limit of bigint value (64bits), ok maybe less (32bits)

today (reading code) i see that big  enum is a problem for .frm file that don't allow this size of enums and i need to get back to a second table, but what should be done to allow a very big enum field? there's a "easy" way to change mariadb code to allow a bigger enum size?

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