Uh, I think I was wired rather the wrong way up, this question is
confused. What a little fresh air can do. Cycling home from the office
cleared the confusion in my head: It is of course nonsense to store all
translations in a single row, also to have different tables for
different languages. You have one table with a 'language' field that
stores the information as to whether this is English, French, etc.; and
then another table for the meta stuff, that also links to the authors
table etc.. So simple. I am a little embarassed.
Frank Joerdens wrote:
>
> I've got an articles table where I want to store texts, of which several translations
> exist. Thanks to TOAST I can now store texts of arbitrary length directly in the table,
> which is already a big advantage over stuffing them into the file system and trying to
> keep the database and file system in sync. What I am wondering is:
>
> >From a conceptual point of view, it appears better to keep all translations in one table.
> I forget what exactly the argument is; it has something to do with normalization theory.
> Anyway I've already got meta information about articles that applies to all translations -
> such as author, position within the overall structure, related articles etc.; so if I were
> to have a table for every language, then every article row in any language-table
> corresponding to a particular article would have to link with the same row in authors,
> index, etc., and the structure would get more complicated than it needs to be. However,
> with a long article of maybe several 100 K, and translations in 6 languages (this is
> theoretical, actually I have only 2 at the moment), the row size would increase
> accordingly. Does this pose a problem for TOAST? Is it a better plan to have a separate
> table for each language?
>
> - Frank