Here is one approach that is easy and involves no programming. It is probably not the most elegant, but it would work.

If you have Front Page 2003, you can create  a new list  which is nothing but a view of the lookup  table in SQL Server. This is easy to do but I cannot tell you the steps because it has been a while. IThen you can use the new list (above) to populate  the column  in the list of interest.

would guess that there is information on how to do this on http://www.sharepointcustomization.com.

See this: www.sharepointcustomization.com/.../default.htm

Good Luck