Hi Tom,

I didn't see this as part of the natural/surrogate key debate. Is saw this more as avoiding having the valid values for a column removed from one or more check constraints and placed in a small lookup table. There is no need for a surrogate key in such a situation (except for saving storage space) and the beauty is that if management do change their mind about the valid column values then you only have to amend the values in the look up table and do not have drop and recreate the check constraint(s).

As you observe one size doesn't fit all either in the natural vs surrogate debate, nor in this update cascade matter. It is really up to the developer to decide what is most appropriate in their unique situation. Phil was just making us aware of another tool that we may have not considered before.

Kind regards,

John