Whether you store an ID or a text string is a question of duplication. When you use an ID, the information that is meaningful to humans (such as the word Philanthropy) is stored in only one place, and everything that refers to it uses an ID (which only has meaning within the database). When you store the text directly, you are duplicating the human-meaningful information in every record that uses it. The advantage of using an ID is that because it has no meaning to humans, it never needs to change: the ID can remain the same, even if the information it identifies changes. Anything that is
...more
