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.
I had Claude Code run a micro-benchmark comparing different approaches to implementing tagging in SQLite. Traditional many-to-many tables won, but FTS5 came a close second. Full table scans with LIKE queries performed better than I expected, but full table scans with JSON arrays and json_each() were much slower.
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