Tell me more ×  I am building a photography website and I want
to allow the user to put tags on their photos for easy
searching. But I'm not sure if I want the tags to be an nvarchar
field in each picture and then search for that tag in each
record or if I want to pull them out and create a separate table
of tags and tagIds and then have a look up table, so I can just
search the database for that ID. So, what I'm asking is which
would be better efficiency-wise and scalability-wise. The
database will have over 3-4000 pictures.  share|improve this
question this is probably better fit –  Lie Ryan Sep 11 '11 at
12:27 After writing my answer, I noticed the "The database will
have over 3-4000 pictures". With such a tiny number of pictures,
it doesn't matter too much. Efficiency-wise, I would just pull
the entire list of tags when web app starts, store this in a
cache, and avoid querying the database later. –  MainMa Sep 11
'11 at 13:11 At what point would the number of pictures start to
affect it? Are we talking hu