Let's take this status table:
id | name
---+-------
1 | active
2 | inactive
3 | banned
In this case, I know that this table will not be edited ever, and if it is, it will happen extremely rarely and most likely a status will only be added. Also, the name is basically for when you look at the DB manually as it is never displayed anywhere.
Let's say a user table has a status_id field (with a foreign key constraint to the status table, for good measure). Knowing the status of the user by looking at the database is pretty straight forward. But let's go to the code...
In PHP it's very