Question

I want to accomplish nearly the same thing as this question, which is to store authentication data from multiple sources (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, openID, my own site, etc.) so that one person can log in to their account from any/all of the mentioned providers.

The only caveat being that all user data needs to be stored in a single table.

Any suggestions?

If there is no clean way to accomplish this, is it better to have tons of columns for all of the possibly login methods or create additional tables to handle the login methods with Foreign Keys relating back to the user table (as described in this answer)?

Answer 1

perhaps you want to create a table dedicated to the account types, along with a table for the actual user.

Say you have a users table with an auto_increment uinique ID for each user. Then, you want to create another table example: user_accounts, with it’s own auto_icnrement ID, another column for relational ID (to the users table and a 3rd (or/and) 4th table for account type / extra data for authentication if needed.

You then insert a record for each account type for each user. Basically it may look like this:

user_accounts

| ID | User_ID | account_type       | authentication
| 1  | 1       | facebook           | iamthecoolestfacebookerever
| 2  | 1       | google             | mygoogleaccount

In it’s most simplistic form. you will probably be storing much different data than that, but hopefully you get the point.