most of the foreign key columns are not null and most of these tables having foreign keys have views which join to these lookup tables always and I use views...

no problem, thank you so much for the replies.

Is it possible for you to share the high level data model that you used for that system? I mean you can change the table and column names to something...

I do have a status table for the different workflow statuses. the workflow tables are different, they are used to track different states for the ChangeList submitted by the user...

thanks for spending your time to reply to my questions.

the solutions look fine. but let me to explain the problem in a different way. lets say I...