MeridianMERIDIAN

Categorical Value

Discrete string value from a small, unordered set (e.g., "male"/"female", "S"/"C"/"Q", "red"/"blue"/"green", "active"/"inactive"). Typical cardinality: 2-20 unique values. Transforms to ENUM when cardinality is below --enum-threshold (default 50), otherwise VARCHAR. Column-level identification relies on low cardinality detection.

Categorical Value

representation.discrete.categorical

Discrete string value from a small, unordered set (e.g., "male"/"female", "S"/"C"/"Q", "red"/"blue"/"green", "active"/"inactive"). Typical cardinality: 2-20 unique values. Transforms to ENUM when cardinality is below --enum-threshold (default 50), otherwise VARCHAR. Column-level identification relies on low cardinality detection.

Domain
representation
Category
discrete
Casts to
ENUM
Scope
Universal

Try it

CLI
$ finetype infer -i "active"
→ representation.discrete.categorical

DuckDB

Detect
SELECT finetype('active');
-- → 'representation.discrete.categorical'
Cast expression
CAST({col} AS VARCHAR)
Safe cast pipeline
-- Normalise and cast in one step
SELECT TRY_CAST(finetype_cast(my_column) AS ENUM) AS clean_value
FROM my_table
WHERE finetype(my_column) = 'representation.discrete.categorical';

JSON Schema

finetype schema representation.discrete.categorical
{
  "$id": "https://meridian.online/schemas/representation.discrete.categorical",
  "$schema": "https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema",
  "description": "Discrete string value from a small, unordered set (e.g., \"male\"/\"female\", \"S\"/\"C\"/\"Q\", \"red\"/\"blue\"/\"green\", \"active\"/\"inactive\"). Typical cardinality: 2-20 unique values. Transforms to ENUM when cardinality is below --enum-threshold (default 50), otherwise VARCHAR. Column-level identification relies on low cardinality detection.",
  "examples": [
    "active",
    "male",
    "S",
    "red",
    "pending",
    "Type A"
  ],
  "maxLength": 50,
  "minLength": 1,
  "title": "Categorical Value",
  "type": "string",
  "x-finetype-broad-type": "VARCHAR",
  "x-finetype-transform": "CAST({col} AS VARCHAR)"
}

Examples

activemaleSredpendingType A

Aliases

categoryenumfactorlevel

Type Registry