Best-practices for localizing a SQL Server (2005/2008) database

Question

Question

I\'m sure many of you have been faced by the challenge of localizing a database backend to an application. If you\'ve not then I\'d be pretty confident in

Answer 1

I think you can stick with XML which allows for a cleaner design. I would go further and take advantage of the xml:lang attribute which is designed for this usage :

  Detta är ett namn
  This is a name

One step further, you could select the localized resource in your query via a XPath query (as suggested in the comments) to avoid any client side treatment. This would give something like this (untested) :

SELECT Name.value('(l10n/text[lang()="en"])[1]', 'NVARCHAR(MAX)')
  FROM Product
  WHERE Product.ID=10;

Note that this solution would be an elegant but less efficient solution than the separate table one. Which may be OK for some application.