Does anyone here use the concept of a lookup table. A lookup table is a table in a database that holds data that is very constant in structure.

IE

id, type, name, description, active



These can be a very broad range of things, and I was thinking of implementing one of these.

I find myself having the need to lookup several items that would fit into this lookup table IE colors, styles, and themes


In a normal setup, I would have to make three seperate queries to 3 seperate tables to gather all of this.

However, with a lookups table I simply have 1 query

SELECT id, type, name, description FROM lookups WHERE type IN ('colors', 'styles', 'themes') AND active = '1'


Has anyone else implemented one of these before and if so seen any performance increases or decreases through the use of one of these?

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