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

That's one of the questions that are difficult to answer because there are so many "it depends" in the answer :-)

The answer depends on the amount of localized items in the database, on deployment scenarios, caching issues, access patterns and so on. If you can give us some data on how big the application is, how many concurrent users it will have and how it will be deployed, that would be very helpful.

In general terms I usually use one of two approaches:

1. Store the localized items near the executable (localized ressource dlls)
2. Store localized items in the DB and introduce a localeID column in tables that contain the localized items.

The advantage of the first method is the good VisualStudio support. The advantage of the second is the centralized deployment.