While splitting it up into multiple tables is probably a better design, that still doesn't solve the problem of needing "to return a list of items for any combi

While splitting it up into multiple tables is probably a better design, that still doesn't solve the problem of needing "to return a list of items for any combination of tags/properties". What I would suggest in this case is some fairly heavy-handed front-end programming in which you determine the SQL code to execute based on the props/tags your user has queried upon. One thing you do not want to do it to use dynamic SQL for fear of both SQL injection and the performance. This is done in almost every app w/ search or dropdown functionality - I'd suggest you find some open source projects in your languages that do it and copy/learn.