Simon Willison’s Weblog

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20th March 2026

Research SQLite Tags Benchmark: Comparing 5 Tagging Strategies — Benchmarking five tagging strategies in SQLite reveals clear trade-offs between query speed, storage, and implementation complexity for workflows involving tags (100,000 rows, 100 tags, average 6.5 tags/row). Indexed approaches—materialized lookup tables on JSON and classic many-to-many tables—easily outperform others, handling single-tag queries in under 1.5 milliseconds, while raw JSON and LIKE-based solutions are much slower.

This is a beat by Simon Willison, posted on 20th March 2026.

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