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I’ve heard of a few ways to implement tagging; using a mapping table between TagID and ItemID (makes sense to me, but does it scale?), adding a fixed number of possible TagID columns to ItemID (seems like a bad idea), Keeping tags in a text column that’s comma separated (sounds crazy but could work). I’ve even heard someone recommend a sparse matrix, but then how do the tag names grow gracefully?
Am I missing a best practice for tags?
Three tables (one for storing all items, one for all tags, and one for the relation between the two), properly indexed, with foreign keys set running on a proper database, should work well and scale properly.