Posts Tagged ‘database normalization’

A more relational dictionary

Feb 20 2016 ยท Random

As I started looking to add more functionality to Lexiio, I realized the Wiktionary definitions database dump I was using wasn’t going to cut it; specifically, I needed a normalized schema, or I’d have data duplication all over the place. I started normalizing in MySQL, but whether it was MySQL or MySQL Workbench, I kept running into character encoding issues. Using a simple INSERT-SELECT, in MySQL 5.7, to transfer words from the existing table to a new table resulted losing characters:

MySQL losing characters

I dumped the data into PostgreSQL, didn’t encounter the issue, and just kept working from there.

The normalized schema can be downloaded here: LexiioDB normalized
(released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License)

LexiioDB schema

The unknown_words and unknown_to_similar_words tables is specific to Lexiio and serve as a place to store unknown words entered by the user and close/similar matches to known words (via the Levenshtein distance).

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