trying to implement a friends list, but not sure of how to represent it

[renwoshin]

hi,

i'm trying to make a friend's list type thing for our users, but I'm not sure how I should represent it in a database.

Here are the possibilities I thought of:
1) make a table for every username and every row would be a friend
2) make one table for all the usernames and add a column for each friend
3) somehow make a table within a table (is this even possible?) with the inner table being the friends of the username

What do you guys think would be the best representation for a "friend's list"?

[renwoshin]

specificially, would it be inefficient to add a table for each user? Like, if we had 3000 tables for one database, will that be bad?

[renwoshin]

so no one knows the maximum number of tables in a database?

[fenway]

Don't do it that way -- I've posted a response to your question on [a href=\"http://www.mysqlfreaks.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8962&hl=\" target=\"_blank\"]this MySQLFreaks.com thread[/a].