Hi, i'm in need of devleoping a instant messaging solution, both the server and the client. I'm in search of a database design which will be optimal.
Basically i'm not able to decide how to maintain the contact lists of each & every user... how that table should be designed?
thanks for the quick reply and the tip antoine... just like you've said about optimality, since each client will have lot of contacts, redundancy will occur and the table size will increase too much... any optimization idea??
@Antonie I've just checked out the table design of wordpress. It's using the same method you described for maintaining it's categories.
It's maintaining a separate table for categories, posts, and category lists. The category lists table contains the post id, and the category id. Multiple times same post id can be observed meaning same post belonging to different categories. Almost similar to my requirement, a person belonging to different user's lists and a user having different contacts in his list.
Seems like this is the design being used a lot... I'm also going with it. thanks a lot for your help antonie
