I'm creating a table for allowing website users to become friends. I'm trying to determine which is the best table design to store and return a user's friends. The goal is to have fast queries and not use up a lot of db space.
I have two options:
Have individual rows for each friendship.
+----+-------------+-------------------+
| ID | User_ID | Friend_ID |
+----+-------------+-------------------+
| 1 | 102 | 213 |
| 2 | 64 | 23 |
| 3 | 4 | 344 |
| 4 | 102 | 2 |
| 5 | 102 | 90 |
| 6 | 64 | 88 |
+----+-------------+-------------------+
Or store all friends in one row as CSV
+----+-------------+-------------------+
| ID | User_ID | Friend_ID |
+----+-------------+-------------------+
| 1 | 102 | 213,44,34,67,8 |
| 2 | 64 | 23,33,45,105 |
+----+-------------+-------------------+
When retrieving friends I can create an array using explode() however deleting a user would be trickier.
Edit: For second method I would separate each id in array in php for functions such as counting and others.
Which method do you think is better?