How important are lookup tables?

Question

A lot of the applications I write make use of lookup tables, since that was just the way I was taught (normalization and such). The problem is that the queries I make are of

Answer 1

For look-up tables I use a sensible primary key -- usually just a CHAR(1) that makes sense in the domain with an additional Title (VARCHAR) field. This can maintain relationship enforcement while "keeping the SQL simple". The key to remember here is the look-up table does not "contain data". It contains identities. Some other identities might be time-zone names or assigned IOC country codes.

For instance gender:

ID Label
M  Male
F  Female
N  Neutral

select * from people where gender = 'M'

Alternatively, an ORM could be used and manual SQL generation might never have to be done -- in this case the standard "int" surrogate key approach is fine because something else deals with it :-)

Happy coding.