Enums currently map to the type code SqlType.TINYINT by default, which is a 1 byte type. This mapping is not quite correct as Java effectively allows up to 32K enum entries, so the goal is to switch to SMALLINT.

In practice, this wasn't a big issue though for two reasons. A lot of databases do not support a 1 byte integer DDL type, so Hibernate falls back to the 2+ byte integer type as DDL type. Apart from that, enums in ORM models usually do not exceed the 255 value limit.