Question

This problem is very simple i think…

I dont have experience with big scalable databases, and im working in a project and im facing this design problem:

I have a table for subscriptors and have a table for the services they could be subscribed to, both tables will grow, the subscriptors can be subscribed to how many services they want, the problem is to estore the relation subscritor -> service i dont know wich would be the proper way, i think it should be one of this options:

• Create a table per service to estore the subscriptor list.
• Create a table for the subscriptors and dinamically add new columns to represent the service.
• Create a table for the subscritors and use a Binary Mask to store the list of services the user is subscribed to.

Wich way would be the best and more practical, and scalable solution? any other options are apreciated. thanks beforehand.

PS: Im using MySQL

Answer 1

This is a classic many-to-many relationship – in relational databases, the standard way to deal with this is one table for each side of the relationship and one to store the links between them – like so:

Subscriber
----------
SubscriberID (PK)
SubscriberName
etc...

Service
-------
ServiceID (PK)
ServiceName
etc...

SubscriberService
-----------------
SubscriberID (PK)
ServiceID    (PK)