Question

I am currently working on a system that would allow users to add additional custom fields for the contacts that they add.

I wondered what is the best and most efficient approach to add such ability?

Right now what I was thinking was to have 1 table per users (with foreign keys to a “main” contacts table) and then adding a column for each custom fields that the user adds (since I don’t expect to have more then 100-200 users per database shards [sharding is easy since every users never see each-other’s content in this system]), although I am not 100% sure that this would be the right solution for such problems.

Answer 1

Maybe you could try to have one separated table to store a reference to the user, plus the field name and value, this way you will be able to have lots of custom fields.