Foreign key or String value from foreign table?
===

Lets say you have an employee table and a jobs list table. Each employee must have one job in the table. Normally I would give each job an id and reference it as a foreign key in the employee table. One of my collegues however has suggested that we use the jobs list table as a dictionary and that before inserting / updating we check the 'job type' is present in the table and then insert the job type as a string into the employee table.

As far as I can see

**the Pros:**

> Faster selects (although a join on a primary key should make marginal
> difference)

**the Cons:**

> Slower to select employees by job type               
 More difficult to change a job
> type

Anything I missed?

