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I am integrating a friends system for my website…
One question I have about the mysql table is how it is to be set up.
Will I have many columns for each friend they add, such as freind 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on and the row will be the user who has added them.
Is there a better way to do this?? With my first thought doing it that way would mean a cap on the amount of friends someone can have…
Your suggestion of multiple columns would violate first normal form. As well as artificially restricting the number of friends such structures are tedious to work with and inefficient.
You need a junction table for friends with 2 columns (
userid1,userid2) that form a composite primary key. Both columns would have a FK relationship with theusertable.In many RDBMSs you would also have a check constraint
userid1 > userid2so a relationship can only be stored in one form but I believe check constraints are somewhat broken in MySQL.