Performance of full text search varies with column length or not??

[us97013]

Hi all,

Please tell me for the same number of records (let say 1 million) whether the performance of full-text search varies with the length of a column or not on which full text search is applied?

For example, for an item to search based on tags, which of the following approach is faster?

a)Make a text column of 2048 characters at most and add all the tags for a particular item in the same column separated by commas (it means there could be maximum of 128 tags of 15 character each that can be stored for an item). Table would be something like this:

Table_Item(ItemId INTEGER, Tags TEXT => Full text search here)

and so there will be only one record for each item.

b) Instead of above approach store separate tags in separate rows and Tag column is at most 64 character long as follows:

Table_Item (ItemId INTEGER, Tag VARCHAR(64) => Full text search here)

There will be as many records for a particular ItemId as there are number of tags for it.

So please tell me which approach is better.

Thanks,

Arsalan