Supposing we have a field status (0 for disabled, 1 for enabled), and we need to get the literal values directly using MySQL, in other words: if we requested the query:

select status
from `<table>`

We need the column to appear like this:

  status
----------
 disabled
 enabled

not as following:

 status
--------
   0
   1

Knowing that we don't have a mysql status table to join with and get the values as usual.

You would use a case statement, such as this:

select (case when status = 0 then 'disabled'
             when status = 1 then 'enabled'
        end)
from . . .

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