How would I structure database the best?

What is the best MySQL database structure for a social networking website?

• How would you structure a MySQL database for a social networking website? Would you use one database for every user and tables within the databases to store user data such as friends and activities or, would you create one database for the social network and have multiple tables that has all users' friends and activities?

• Answer:

  Firstly, I would choose one database for the website. The reason for it is that it takes more time to walk through different databases than to walk through tables within a database and that time difference is quite considerable. If you will be creating a database for each user, there will be serious performance issues. Plus maintaining relationship among entities will be very difficult. How will you structure a MySQL database? That depends on what I am creating. In general identify the entities in your project then attributes associated with them then how the entities are related. So these entities will become your table and attributes will be columns in them respectively. The relationship sometimes also needs a table. For a social network, User will be entity and her details will be attributes. The relation between two users, friends, will also need a table to store(who is friends with whom).