Optimization / Design questions for rdbms

Databases
1

So, I will be have over 1 million small text entries. Think twitter size. Each entry will have a variable mount of metadata. I am going to implement search on the entries and it’s variable metadata. Should I store the metadata in the text field and do some string magic in the server side code to split it up? Or, should I implement a many to many like tag system for the metadata of the entries?

Thanks.

2

i would prefer the tagging option, since search would be lot easier to handle.

3

server side “string magic” is fine, as long as you are happy with doing a table scan of the entire table every time you want to search for something

4

I’d skip the RDBMS and use something like lucene to handle the tag (and full-text) search duties.