Keep a friend table that holds the UserID and then the UserID of the friend (we will call it FriendID). Both columns would be foreign keys back to the Users table.
Somewhat useful example:
Table Name: User
Columns:
UserID PK
EmailAddress
Password
Gender
DOB
Location
TableName: Friends
Columns:
UserID PK FK
FriendID PK FK
(This table features a composite primary key made up of the two foreign
keys, both pointing back to the user table. One ID will point to the
logged in user, the other ID will point to the individual friend
of that user)
Example Usage:
Table User
--------------
UserID EmailAddress Password Gender DOB Location
------------------------------------------------------
1 [email protected] bobbie M 1/1/2009 New York City
2 [email protected] jonathan M 2/2/2008 Los Angeles
3 [email protected] joseph M 1/2/2007 Pittsburgh
Table Friends
---------------
UserID FriendID
----------------
1 2
1 3
2 3
This will show that Bob is friends with both Jon and Joe and that Jon is also friends with Joe. In this example we will assume that friendship is always two ways, so you would not need a row in the table such as (2,1) or (3,2) because they are already represented in the other direction. For examples where friendship or other relations aren’t explicitly two way, you would need to also have those rows to indicate the two-way relationship.