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

Here is how I've done it. I don't use LINQ or SP for this one, because the query is too complex and is dynamically built and this is just a excerpt of the query.

I have a products table:

* id
* price
* stocklevel
* active
* name
* shortdescription
* longdescription

and a products_globalization table:

* id
* products_id
* name
* shortdescription
* longdescription

As you can see the products-table contains all the globalization-columns aswell. These columns contains the default-language (thus, being able to skip doing a join when requesting the default culture - BUT I'm not sure if this is worth the trouble, I mean the join between the two tables are index-based so... - give me some feedback on this one).

I prefer having a side-by-side table over a global-resourcetable because in certain situations you might need to do i.e. a database (MySQL) MATCH on a couple of columns, such as MATCH(name, shortdescription, longdescription) AGAINST ('Something here').

In a normal scenario some of the product translations might be missing but I still want to show all products (not just the ones who are translated). So it's not enough to do to a join, we actually need to do a left join based on the products-table.

Pseudo:

string query = "";
if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(culture)) {
   // No culture specified, no join needed.
   query = "SELECT p.price, p.name, p.shortdescription FROM products p WHERE p.price > ?Price";
} else {
   query = "SELECT p.price, case when pg.name is null then p.name else pg.name end as 'name', case when pg.shortdescription is null then p.shortdescription else pg.shortdescription end as 'shortdescription' FROM products p"
   + " LEFT JOIN products_globalization pg ON pg.products_id = p.id AND pg.culture = ?Culture"
   + " WHERE p.price > ?Price";
}

I would go with COALESCE instead of CASE ELSE but thats besides the point.

Well, thats my take on it. Feel free to critize my suggestion...

Kind regards, Richard