Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets: Auxiliary, Temporal, and Virtual Tables in SQL

4.4. OTLT or MUCK Table Problems

I think that Paul Keister was the first person to coin the phrase “one true lookup table” (OTLT) for a common SQL programming technique that is popular with newbies. Don Peterson (www.SQLServerCentral.com) gave the same technique the name “massively unified code-key” or MUCK tables in one of his articles.

The technique crops up time and time again, but I will give Paul Keister credit as the first writer to give it a name. Simply put, the idea is to have one table to do all of the code lookups in the schema. It usually looks like this:

CREATE TABLE Look-ups (code_type CHAR(10) NOT NULL, code_value VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, -- notice size! code_description VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, -- notice size! PRIMARY KEY (code_value, ...