Question

I use a table to store various classifications of all words in the dictionary.

It looks like this:

word     category   origin-language
-------  ---------  ---------------
happy    adjective  English
bonjour  greeting   French
...

from a set of classifications, I am able to produce a number.
I want to find a set which produces a minimum, so I want to store many sets of such classifications (each is a table) together with their respective numbers in a storage.

What kind of storage is suitable for this task? I don’t think relational database is suitable, since there is no datatype for tabular data.

Answer 1

I would suggest a single table like yours plus a column to identify the classification set:

Classification (ClassificationSet, Word, Category, OiginLanguage) KEY ???

Several DBMSs do have a type for tables and some (e.g. Oracle) allow nested tables. I don’t think that’s relevant to your problem. It’s usually more straightforward to find an equivalent model without nested tables.