Re: Advice on structure /sequence / trigger

Hi Greg.  Sorry for getting back to you so late on this. I think your
idea on the design is spot on since it will give me referential
integrity with my other and the multi-language will just be a simple
two field table with id and multi-dimensional array of language codes
to string.  Super idea!  Even if the array gets larger it is not a big
issue since postgres can easily handle it.

Regards,
David

On Friday, June 17, 2005, at 12:15 AM, Greg Stark wrote:

>
> David Pratt <fairwinds@eastlink.ca> writes:
>
>> I just want to get this right because it will be an important part of
>> what I am
>> preparing. Sorry for the really long message but I don't know if  it
>> would make
>> any sense if I did not fully explain what i am wanting to do. I am
>> not french
>> so excuse my sample translations...
>
> FWIW I started with a design much like this. I threw it out when I
> started
> having to actually use it and found it just entirely unworkable. It
> was bad
> enough that every single query had to do a subquery for every single
> text
> field but the first time I actually had to *load* the data I realized
> just how
> much work every single insert, delete, and update was going to be...
>
> I ended up storing every text field as a text[] and assigning each
> language an
> index into the array. This only works because in my application
> everything
> will have precisely the same (small) set of languages available. If
> you have a
> large variety of languages and each string will be available in a
> varying
> subset then this model might not work as well. It did require a bit of
> extra
> work handling arrays since my language driver doesn't do handle them
> directly.
>
> I can't make a principled argument for this being the "right" model
> but it's
> working well in practice for me and I can't see the fully normalized
> model
> ever working out well. One thing that worries me is that neither the
> array
> feature set nor the i18n feature set is stable yet and future changes
> might
> break my code. But I think it'll be workable.
>
> --
> greg
>