I think I know what I plan to do, but want to throw this out there to see if there are differing points of view.
I have a mailing list table, and 2 of the columns contain values which have to be from a list. These are country and status. There are 237 possible countries and 3 possible statuses. Now I know some people would assign a sequence ID (surrogate key) to the country and status values, and have them looked up in separate tables to get the textual value, but I think I'll still have those tables, just without an ID column, so 1 column for both the countries and statuses tables. This means storing the proper value in the main table. So instead of name, email, country, status 'mr smith', 'emailaddr...@example.com', 44, 2 'mrs jones', 'm...@emailcompany.com', 21, 1 I'd have name, email, country, status 'mr smith', 'emailaddr...@example.com', 'China', 'Registered' 'mrs jones', 'm...@emailcompany.com', 'Belgium', 'Unconfirmed' The values of course would be constrained by foreign key lookup to their associated tables. Are there any serious downsides to this? If so, what would you recommend? Thanks Thom
