ID for tags in tag systems

Question

I\'m implementing a tag system similar to StackOverflow tag system. I was thinking about when storing the tags and relating to a question, that relationship will be directly wit

Answer 1

If you foresee many tags, and are using a relational database, using an ID that the database supports natively (e.g. RID) internally may just give you better performance.

If that's not a concern: go by simple short tag names. You can give the tags long names which will be displayed in the user interface too where it makes sense (e.g. ask the user for one when creating a new tag). You are more likely to have to edit the long names, which nothing refers to directly, so this is not a problem.

Aside, if you are using a relational database, it is probably not very difficult to change a tag name together with all its references with a simple query, it may just be a slightly more expensive operation, but it is probably not going to be done frequently enough that you need to optimize for it. And consider that you may have duplicate tags that you will want to merge too, so you might want to be able to do that anyway.