How to store tags for a blog article in SQL database?

Question

I currently am working on developing a blogging website. For this application we're using MySQL as the database. For this application,I created a blog table which contains the following properties:

• id
• blog_title
• content
• user_id
• updated_at
• upvotes

I want to add tags to this table. What is the recommended way of adding tags to this table so that in the application I can search for articles/blogs based on tags ?

Answer 1

It is common to use many-to-many relationship for tags. In your case it can be a couple of tables:

tags

• id
• name

tag_blog

• tag_id (foreign key to tags)
• article_id (foreign key to articles)

You can set combination of (tag_id, article_id) as primary key. In this case it will be guaranteed that tag can be mentioned only once for the given article.