I too use this concept very successfully. In fact I have 2 such tables, one for lookup values whose natural key is numeric, and one for values whose natural key is alphanumeric. From this you can correctly infer I don't use the LookGID column as I prefer to use the natural key instead. For example, I have school types of GVNS, GVSL, NGOT, etc - these values are meaningful to the user, so this is the natural key for SchoolType, and I therefore don't have to insert artificial values into the data in order to relate the value to its lookup descriptor. I have extended this concept into a data dictionary, where the lookup table and type are stored in a data dictionary - this is then used by my application to generate the necessary lookups to expand the values retrieved from the database into their corresponding descriptors. I