Question

I am creating a database table that’ll have a list of all Tags available in my application (just like SO’s tags).

Currently, I don’t have anything associated with each tag (and I’ll probably never have), so my idea was to have something of the form

Tags (Tag(pk) : string)

Should this be the way to do it? Or should I instead do something like

Tags (tag_id(pk) : int, tag : string)

I guess looking up on the table in the 2nd case would be faster than in the first one, but that it also takes up more space?

Thanks

Answer 1

I’d go for the second option with the surrogate key.

It will mean the table takes up more space but will likely reduce space over all assuming that you have the tag information as a foreign key in other tables (e.g. a posts/tags table)

using an int rather than a string will make the lookups required to enforce the foreign key more efficient and mean that updates of tag titles don’t need to affect multiple tables.