Database Design

[eluser]jleequeen[/eluser]
Hi all,

In rewriting my app in CI, I have stumbled upon a question related to the database. I currently have a table of counties. Right now I have a counties ID which is 1-100 for each county. Then where needed elsewhere in my tables, I use this County ID. Of course when I do any queries using any of the county information, I have to do a JOIN to get the actual county name. I'm wonder if it would be better to actually have the county name as the "Natural Key" instead of just a numerical ID.

The name of the counties will never change, and it seems like it'd make the queries much better and dumps of the data easier if it just had the full county name without having to do the JOIN.

Anyone have two cents to throw my way on this?