Not sure what's premature here. The optimization is to allow me, a human, to find a certain class of database records quickly. I also chose a method that I understand to be snappy on the SQL side as well.

What would you suggest as a non-optimized alternative? That might make your point about premature optimization clearer.

There is indeed a trade-off, and the direction I would have chosen is to use meaningful status names as opposed to magic numbers. My reasoning being that maintenance cost in terms of how self-explanatory the system is makes more sense to me economically than obscuring the meaning behind some of the code/data for a practically non-existent performance benefit.

After all, hardware is cheap, but developer time isn't.

For a more concrete example, I might have chosen the value `'pending'` (or similar) instead of `5`. Active listings might have status `'active'`. Expired ones might have status `'expired'`, etc.