Normalized or not, that's the question ...

Hi there

We have a 'hot' (and loud ...) discussion here about the degree of normalization of a table. We're working on a three lingual application
(german, french and italian) and have to store text for each language.
An user can only select (no updates, inserts or deletes allowed) and seee then the text in its own language.

Some developers said the table must look like this :

    nr           number primar key,
    text_g       varchar2(30),
    text_f       varchar2(30),
    text_e       varchar2(30)

Ohters said that's wrong : we have to create a table for each language :

     Table German
     ------------

     nr           number primary key,
     text         varchar2(30)

and the same for french and italian.

IMO is the first case not very good : they have then to create the application and ask for a language code and then select the right field from the table. In the second case they can create a private synonym
(for each user) that shows the correct language table, so no application
programming becomes necessary.

Any advice/opinion is welcome !

Thanks (and sorry for my poor english ...).

Rene Received on Wed Nov 27 1996 - 00:00:00 CET