SEO-friendly URL's

[eluser]jplanet[/eluser]
I am working on a CI ecommerce project. There are three main levels to the site:

- List of top-level categories
- List of subcategories under each category
- List of products under each sub-category

In the database, the Category and products tables both have a column called static_name. This is a plain-English name representation of the product or category, so that URL's can look like:

List of sub-categories for a given category:
www.example.com/category/Kids-Toys

and for product lists under each subcategory:
www.example.com/products/Board-Games

Now, this already seems quite optimized to me. My client is wondering if there would be any benefit to getting rid of the function names entirely, so that URL's would only contain they key, whether it was a category or product list:

www.example.com/Kids-Toys
and
www.example.com/Board-Games

To do this I would have to enforce a rule that every product and category must have a unique value in the static_file field. Then every URL request would run a query to see which table contains the value, and delegate to the applicable function.

Does this seem like a fundamentally bad idea? It strikes me that this structure could be quite fragile to maintain...Is there even anything gained as far as SEO goes, or is there some benefit that may be worth the trouble?