I tried to implement this in 2020 (https://github.com/metabrainz/musicbrainz-server/commit/34c20792c5c360634b7c5ee58b79dc097d3fe0d8) by just calculating the sort name combination for artist credits on the fly when sorting by artist was requested, but this is horribly slow. bitmap suggested materializing them in the artist_credit table instead so that they don't need to be calculated each time, which would mean rather than doing array_agg(musicbrainz_collate(a.sort_name) ORDER BY acn.position) as sort_names on the Data::Release call, we would have a sort_names column in artist_credit that stores array_agg(musicbrainz_collate(a.sort_name) ORDER BY acn.position) and is updated when the artist sort names or the artist credit change.