Developing a search and tag heavy website

Question

I'm in the planning phase of developing a very tag heavy website. Everything will essentially be associated with tags and the entire site would be based on searching these tags.

Now, I've been thinking a lot about going the nosql route here, since from what I read and understand, it makes the most sense for something like this.

Would it be best to go with this database system? Would it makes sense to go with the relational database system? Should I think incorporating something like SOLR?

What would the ideal setup be?

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UPDATE:

Ideally they would be user generated, but we all know how that would turn out with giving users that much power. So, let’s change up the requirements and say that users WILL NOT have the power to create tags.

Searching on tags based on text matches is something that would probably be useful and needed. If the tag is “garage sale”, the search for “sale” should also pick this up, at a lower relevance for sure.

I can’t imagine the usage being so much that scaling would be an issue.

Thanks

Answer 1

I would spend a bit of time thinking about these tags. For example, are these tags going to be user generated or will you provide a few tags and let users select which ones they want?

Will you need to search on tags based on text matches? For example if a tag is "garage sale" do you want to search for "sale" to also pick this up? Maybe at a lower relevance?

Also, what kind of usage are you looking at? One good thing about Solr is that it's super easy to scale and synchronize data, it is easy to deploy multiple nodes, shard collections and replicate data to other nodes, something that traditional databases struggle with.

Another thing to keep in mind is that most of the time, Solr is not the official "repository of record", most of the time the data gets fed to it from a DB somewhere, but all reading activities are done from Solr.

Answer 2

See this answer for a SQL solution. Offhand I can't think of any advantage to using most NoSQL databases (i.e. key-value, columnar, or document) as the SQL solution will be more compact and ought to give good performance; a graph database may be appropriate if you're doing a lot of navigational type queries on your tags, but it doesn't sound like that's the case.

Use of Solr (or ElasticSearch or whatever) is orthogonal to your primary database; it may be appropriate to incorporate a search tool if users are typing inexact tags for search, but I recommend integrating a stemming library or something along those lines before turning to a full blown search tool.