Timwi wrote:
However, I'm not convinced that this really matters. It would only have to search on the entire fulltext index if you actually wanted to search the entire table (an inter-language search). If you had an integer column that specifies the language of an article, and an index on that, then searching only the English text would be equal in speed to having a separate table for the English text.
At least this is how I understand it. Of course I may well be wrong. I'll ask a MySQL expert later on, when he's online :-)
I have asked my friend and he confirmed by suspicion.
If you have several large tables A, B, C, ... etc. with identical columns and types (that could, for example, be the recentchanges tables for the different languages), you can always combine them into a big table with an extra (indexed) integer or other fixed-length column that specifies what original table the row came from (i.e. what language it's in), and it won't be any slower.
Greetings, Timwi