Niall, you've (probably accidentally) checked the "Disable BB Code in this message" checkbox in your post. I've edited your post to uncheck it so that the code tags would be applied.
It is obviously not possible to use enum if the source of the data is in the database. You could create a class that would represent individual entries from the table and populate it using
JDBC. Perhaps JPA or other ORM framework could be quite useful here.
If the table is really static, you might perhaps automatically generate the source code of the enum from the database table. Whether this is usable for you is hard to say; I'm using this approach in one project, in which some entries from the table are always known to be there.