Tag System

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
An interesting article, but for all the wrong reasons.

How anyone could --

a) think that a full text search, examining every row, containing multiple virtual fields within a single fat varchar column, could in any way be noteworthy (especially by someone blogging about database design) or indeed flexible (what happens when you exceed 255 chars worth of tags, or you have tags with spaces) or elegant (caching is pretty impossible, false positive hits on substring searches would be a right royal pain), let alone fast (I mean, come on, really)

b) not ineluctably settle upon the above design (or as he attributes it, the 'toxi' <sic> approach) after a moment's introspection

-- is a tad bewildering.

There are two entities They have an n:n relationship. Any simpler and you've got yourself a post-it note.