[RESOLVED] Best Practice For Naming a Column

[aaron_karp]

I'm setting up a table, called FriendLookup with 2 columns only. The purpose of the column is two link two friends together. Each friend has his own row in the Users table, and his own unique ID.

Since each friend is pretty much identical, and each needs to be linked to all his other friends, I figured I'd set up a many to many table. The problem is, what do I name the columns? Am I even structuring this table correctly? What's the best way to match up two rows in a database?

Thanks guys. I'm working on a new site so I've had a bunch of questions already and I'll probably continue to have more =) I do appreciate all the help.

[bastien]

I would probably use USERID and FRIENDID

[aaron_karp]

I guess then, if I wanted to find all of one user's friends, I'd have to query:

"SELECT * FROM FriendLookup WHERE UserId = '$ID' OR FriendID = '$ID'"

And then I'd have to decipher which one is the friend and which is the original user?

Is there a cleaner way to organize the data?

[bastien]

Iwould suspect that you really want to do the look up based on the user

[coreyp_1]

That wouldn't be too bad. I would probably just make two records, one for each person. This way, you could add specific information about that friend that may not apply in reverse. For example, one person could group his friends (family, coworkers, people I really want to avoid but pretend to like, etc.) by simply adding another field to the record.
Your way would be a problem when you try to do JOINs, I would think.
And, Yes, I know it will require twice as many records to do it this way.

[aaron_karp]

Yeah, that occured to me too, corey, and I think it might not be a bad idea. While it will create a lot of duplicate records, it's not going to be a ton of information. Plus, you're right, I could extend the functionality of the site by expanding the types of relationships. Thanks.