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Asked: 2026-05-13T15:39:47+00:00

I found out two possible solutions for implementing the database structure for social networking

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I found out two possible solutions for implementing the database structure for social networking sites like Facebook.

1.: Creating a ‘Relationships’ table and inserting every friendship into it. For example: user A adds B as friend (A-B), then the logic puts (A-B) and (B-A) into the ‘Relationships’ table. Then it indexes the first attribute.

2.: Creating a unique table for all the users containing friends. Most databases work with nearly 2 billion unique tables, so it won’t be a problem; however, the database size will be nearly 300 times bigger (expecting 300 friends average per user). In this scenario, querying friends would not be a problem (as simple as SELECT * FROM)

Any ideas? Am I wrong somewhere?
Thanks all.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The table-per-user solution that you are describing sounds basically like Oracle’s partitions feature.

    Not exactly related, but I recommend this awesome post: Presentation Summary “High Performance at Massive Scale: Lessons Learned at Facebook”

    I think that the friendships table is the least of their concerns 🙂

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