SQLite Tags Benchmark: Comparing 5 Tagging Strategies

Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: WorkOS — The infrastructure fast-growing B2B companies use to sell to Enterprise. 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. Posted 20th March 2026 at 2:57 am Recent articles Experimenting with Starlette 1.0 with Claude skills - 22nd March 2026 Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments - 21st March 2026 Thoughts on OpenAI acquiring Astral and uv/ruff/ty - 19th March 2026 This is a beat by Simon Willison, posted on 20th March 2026. json 145 sqlite 453 Monthly briefing Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments. Pay me to send you less! Sponsor & subscribe Disclosures Colophon © 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026