title: Best practice/most efficient for rails activerecord storage of field with very reduced set of possible values?
body: <p>I'm trying to create my models for storing users and different contact information fields.<br>
  The idea is to allow a user to have 0 or more registered contact info (eg. 2 telephone numbers, 1 Skype account, personal and work email addresses), so I understand I cannot add said fields to the users model, nor is a good idea in my case to model phone, skype, email, etc as individual tables. This makes me consider using a generic contact info table, with a column for the type of contact info (eg. phone, im, email) and the contact info itself.<br>
  My doubt, due to my lack of experience on this matter, is this: Should I use an integer for the contact info type and handle it on the controller/view side (either through an array or case-like fashion)? Or would it be better to just use a string (gaining clarity in the db data, but with the added penalty in storage, validation and normalization times of said strings)? Is there any best practice regarding this?</p>
  
  <p>I tried searching in multiple ways, but after reading or skimming through 20+ articles I couldn't find anything even close to what I'm trying to ask.<br>
  Thank you in advance!</p>