title: Enum in Hibernate, persisting as an enum
body: <p>In my MySQL database, there's the column "gender enum('male','female')"</p>
  
  <p>I've created my enum "com.mydomain.myapp.enums.Gender", and in my <code>Person</code> entity I'm defined "Gender gender". </p>
  
  <p>Now I'd want to keep the enum type in my MySQL database, but when I launch my application I get:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Wrong column type in MyApp.Person for column Gender. Found: enum, expected: integer</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Why is this? This would be the equivalent as if I'd annotated my "Gender gender" with "@Enumerated(EnumType.ORDINAL)", which I haven't. EnumType seems only to be able to be either ORDINAL or STRING, so how do I specify that it should treat the field as an enum, not as an int? (not that there's much difference, but enough for it to get upset about it.)</p>