I find this comes up a lot, and I'm not sure the best way to approach it.

The question I have is how to make the decision between using foreign keys to lookup tables, or using lookup table values directly in the tables requesting it, avoiding the lookup table relationship completely.

Points to keep in mind:

• With the second method you would need to do mass updates to all records referencing the data if it is changed in the lookup table.

• This is focused more towards tables that have a lot of the column's referencing many lookup tables.Therefore lots of foreign keys means a lot of joins every time you query the table.

• This data would be coming from drop down lists which would be pulled from the lookup tables. In order to match up data when reloading, the values need to be in the existing list (related to the first point).

Is there a best practice here, or any key points to consider?