Question

I have several entries (that will grow into thousands) in a database that I want to be able to index via keywords.

So say I have a table such as:

id | username | email | description

And I want to attach multiple keywords to that user such as:

Tall | Blonde | Male | Skinny

How would I structure the table for that? Much like the keywords used in stackoverflow at the bottom of the new question?

Thanks

Answer 1

you need three tables

users:

id | username | email | description

tags: (will contain Tall, Blonde, Male, Skinny etc… in the name field)

id | name

users_tags:

user_id | tag_id

to make a user have a tag, you add a row to the users_tags table with the ids of the associated items.

both user_id and tag_id should be foreign keys, referring to the appropriate table, and combined, they should form a unique key (possibly primary key).