Is a separate integer namespace property actually necessary? I got the impresion that namespaces were designated by a prefix in the article title, such as Special:, User:, or Wiki:

In that case, one could find all the articles in the Wiki: namespace by doing this query:

SELECT article_id FROM cur WHERE title LIKE "Wiki:%" ;

And if we had some indexes defined, that search would actually be extremely quick to do.

Any reasons why we need to keep a separate column for "namespace"? If we want to keep namespaces in their own column, maybe we should have a table of namespace id's and their corresponding prefix, and then NOT put that prefix as part of the articles actual title.

Jonathan