Question

A user’s Account Settings can be quite lengthy depending on how detailed you might want it to get (e.g. Receive newsletters TINYINT(1), allow search TINYINT(1), etc.). I want to know what the best way of doing this is since right now all these settings are placed in my User table which already has around 30 columns and might grow soon.

Answer 1

You can consider using set data type :- http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/set.html

profile set ('newsletter', 'searchable', ....)

when doing query, it will be :-

select ... from user
where find_in_set('searchable', profile)>0 and ...

alternatively, you can create a profile table to normalize each profile to be one record

user ( id, ...);
user_profile (user_id, profile_id, profile_value);
profile (id, name);

search :-

select ... from user
inner join user_profile on user.id=user_profile.user_id
inner join profile on profile.id=user_profile.profile_id
where profile.name='searchable' and user_profile.profile_value=1 ...