[Tagdb] Tags and data storage

[Philipp Keller]

> Does anyone have any recommendations/thoughts on tag storage?  Are you
> better off storing an entire list of tags associated with one item
> into a single field and then dealing with searching issues later or,
> in the end, do the benefits outweight the size issue by storing each
> tag as a new dB row?
I once wrote an article, which shows different solutions to the problem
[1], and I also did performance tests [2]

As Nitin noticed: You'll probably get problems with the denormalized
version. I suppose you won't save much space if you go for the
denormalized version.

If you just have a small user base and database then I think you
shouldn't do the 3nf solution because it's hard to deal with the tag
orphans.. the MySQL fulltext variant looks good in my eyes.

About the scalability issue Nitin noticed: If you have more than 1
million tagged entries you have to switch from RDBMS to, say, Lucene
anyway, no matter which way you organize tags in you DB

greets
Philipp

[1] http://www.pui.ch/phred/archives/2005/04/tags-database-schemas.html
[2]
http://www.pui.ch/phred/archives/2005/06/tagsystems-performance-tests.html