The idea of creating a blog post to gather people’s opinions is pretty weird, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Hello,

I’m building an application that will have many types of multilingual dynamic content: news, about, announces, meta tags, meta description, and maybe more. The app is a Rails one, so I’ll be talking about tables and not entities.

I’ve been creating a database table for each of the content types above, and I noticed halfway that they have (almost) the same columns: title, body, lang_id. I decided then to use one single table, called text, which will have a text_type_id column, additionally to all the previous columns. type_text will only contain the type of the content (news, about, announce, etc…).

The thing is that I’m not very convinced about what I’ve done, I find it a bit dirty because many kind of data will be stored in the same place. On the other hand, if I create a table for each type, it seems to me that there will be some kind of redundancy, which is also messy in my eyes.

What do you think about this? Please leave a comment explaining what you would have done if you were in my shoes, and why.

Thanks!