Selecting with a large number of foreign keys

I didn't get any answers from the -novice list, maybe you folks know?

In my call tracking database, I have quite a few fields that are numbers
representing primary keys in a number of smaller tables; these are used
when there is a drop-down list of choices that someone can pick from.

My problem is that when I do reports on these, I want to see the name of
the selection instead of the number.  I tried doing this with the
following query (which seems to work well for a small number of these
fields):

SELECT    call_table.field_one,call_table.field_two,field_three_table.name AS field_three
WHERE     field_three_table.id = call_table.field_three;

However, when I start doing this with a LOT of fields, I notice the
backend process growing extremely large (just pulling up all the calls
for two days with 20 fields selected resulting in the backend growing >
50 MB and taking a loooong time.)  Is there a better way to do these?

-- 
Matt Behrens <matt@iserv.net>
Network Operations Center, The Iserv Company