Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist <at> gmail.com> writes:
Other than that, a problem with this is that page titles aren't just in page, they're scattered all over the place. We use (namespace, title) pairs for pagelinks, templatelinks, recentchanges, watchlist, logging, redirect, protected_titles, among others, and probably some extension tables as well. (This isn't necessarily denormalization -- most of those references are supposed to point to the old name if the page is moved, which the page ID wouldn't.)
Would it be very expensive to have a separate (namespace, title, sortkey) table, and join on that for queries that need sorting?