Table structure ideas?

[christophermichael]

I can elaborate if necessary but this should be pretty straightforward.

 

The site I am coding has a membership system of course.  I would like to create associations between members, basically what one might call a friend's list.  But I am not sure how to create this table of relationships.  I do not want to have a table for every member to store each of their 'friends'.  I am not sure about a table with each row being a particular member with their username as the index.  Each column could be a friend but if someone has 200 friends then someone with only 3 would end up with 197 blank fields.  And it seems to be a logistical nightmare to have to deal with the random number of friends that might be listed in each user's row.

 

I am curious if there are any better ideas of how to achieve storing such information.

Thanks!

[ignace]

Should be straight-forward:

 

members (member_id)

friends (member_id, friend_id, status)

 

It should also be noted it works in both ways: if you and a friend both state you are friends then he will not only appear on your profile but also you will appear on his.