Use arrays to store multilanguage texts

[Michal Táborský <michal@taborsky.cz>]

I am wondering, if it's effective to use text arrays to store
multilanguage information.

We used to do it like this:

CREATE TABLE product (
	id serial NOT NULL,
	price float4,
	...
)

CREATE TABLE product_txt (
	product_id integer,
	language_id integer, -- 1=English, 2=Czech, ...
	name text,
	description text,
	...
	PRIMARY KEY (product_id, language_id)
)

Then in queries for English version we used joins:

SELECT product.*, product_txt.*
FROM product JOIN product_txt ON product.id=product_txt.product_id
WHERE product_txt.language_id=1

It works as is supposed to, but of course there is some database
overhead and mainly it is much more complicated to handle data this way.
Since 7.4 introduced arrays, I was thinking about using them for storing
multilanguage strings. Like this:

CREATE TABLE product (
	id serial NOT NULL,
	price float4,
	name text[],
	description text[]
)

Then I'd just do:

SELECT id, price, name[1], description[1] FROM product

Much simpler and IMHO faster (but I'm not a pg-hacker). I never had time
to test it much, but now we are going to build a new database with
multilanguage strings and I am seriously considering using arrays.

The only question, which remains unanswered is how is it with indexes. I
mean--most of the queries on such table are ordered by name, for
example. Therefore I'd do this:

SELECT id, price, name[1], description[1] FROM product ORDER BY name[1]

Is it possible to build an index, which will be used in such query? I
had no luck with CREATE INDEX product_name1 ON product (r[1]), but maybe
the syntax is just somehow different.

Are there any more drawbacks or limitations, that maybe I am not aware
of, which would discourage you from doing the multilanguage support this
way? Should we consider this or stick to the old ways?

Thanks for your attention.

-- 
Michal Taborsky
http://www.taborsky.cz

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