'Followers' and efficiency

Question

I am designing an app that would involve users \'following\' each other\'s activity, in the twitter sense, but I am not very experienced with database/query design/efficienc

Answer 1

Pretty simple and easy to do with full normalisation. If you have a table of users, each with a unique ID, you would have a TABLE_FOLLOWERS table with the columns, USERID and FOLLOWERID which would describe all the followers for each user as a one to one to many relationship.

Even with millions of assosciations on a half decent database server this will perform well and fast as long as you are using a good database (IE, not MS-Access).