For storing friends relationships in social networks, is it better to have another table with columns relationship_id, user1_id, user2_id, time_created, pending or should the confirmed friend's user_id be seralized/imploded into a single long string and stored along side with the other user details like user_id, name, dateofbirth, address and limit to like only 5000 friends similar to facebook?
Are there any better methods? The first method will create a huge table! The second one has one column with really long string...
On the profile page of each user, all his friends need to be retrieved from database to show like 30 friends similar to facebook, so i think the first method of using a seperate table will cause a huge amount of database queries?