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

Hello Rene,

Although I don't have an "answer" for you, I do have some thoughts which you may care to share.

I think that an important issue concerns how often a user will be "attached" to the application for a specific language. By this I mean, is a user one day going to be working in German and then a week later in Italian?

If the connection to a given language is static or varies infrequently, then the option of more language tables is worth considering. Bear in mind, however, that more tables, despite the explicit similarity, requires more development and maintenance, i.e., normalisation in an RDBMS is ideal but challenged sometimes by performance and other practical issues.

You haven't (in your message at least) considered the solution:  

     nr           number primary key,
     language     char(1),
     text         varchar2(30),
 

where language is something like 'G', 'F', 'I'. This would at least make access to the data required by a user much more accessible at the DML level. Access to the text is obviously based around the language indicator which can be combined in a view with other details about the user who is logged in.

Good luck (and by the way, your English is fine)

Graeme Received on Fri Nov 29 1996 - 00:00:00 CET