From the course: Learning Relational Databases

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Utilize lookup tables

Utilize lookup tables

From the course: Learning Relational Databases

Start my 1-month free trial

Utilize lookup tables

- [Instructor] There is one additional type of table that you might find useful in your database that might not have turned up in your research, but don't worry, they're actually very simple to create. These tables are often referred to as lookup tables or validation tables. Lookup tables help support the business rules that you established while gathering the requirements for the system and they make sure that data is entered consistently. Essentially, the idea is that there will be many cases when a valid input in one field will come from a finite list of acceptable values. For instance, in a table that stores customer shipping addresses, there will only be a small list of countries that will serve, or when typing in a two-letter state abbreviation we want to make sure that it's actually entered correctly and represents a real state, and is not just some random two-letter code. These types of lookup tables typically get implemented as a drop-down list in the final user interface…

Contents