How would one store mass storage? This is more of a "future reference" question. In MySQL there are rows and tables, but what if that isn't enough? Like for instance, storing friends. It would be pretty annoying to parse/serialize very long string, including editing them whenever someone unfriends them. Should you create a table like PlayerUUID_friends? Would that overload the database with tables? I would like some feedback ^.^.
Depends on what you mean by mass storage. Can you elaborate a bit on that? If I were you, I'd use an intermediate table between your table Player and Friends, but that might be a bit complex if you know little about MySQL.
Before when I used YAML files, I just needed to do something like so: Code (Text): PlayerWithFriends: - guy1 - guy2 - guy3 But in MySQL, it's Column and Row based, and let's say there was a table that stored information about players. (I know this is not the format, but you know the jist) Player1: - Coins: 22131 - Kills: 123 - Deaths 321 - Friends: ??? (how can I put in multiple friends when it's accustomed for only 1 input, not a whole string, or a serialized string)
The easiest option would just be to store the UUIDs in a comma separated list, however that'd become a very, very long string after they make a few friends. MySQL's TEXT datatype supports ~65000 characters, at 33 characters per UUID (32 plus a comma), each player can have about 2000 friends.
This is a more complex aspect of relation databases such as MySQL. To be able to have a 1 to *, you need to do something like this: PlayerTable - UUID - MoreInfoAboutPlayer FriendsTable - FriendUUID - PlayerUUID To get all the friends from a certain player from PlayerTable, your query would look something like this: Code (Text): SELECT * FROM PlayerTable p INNER JOIN FriendsTable f ON p.UUID = f.PlayerUUID
To elaborate on what @Ferdz said, instead of storing both UUIDs of the friends you can store a reference to the `players` table by putting in the id of the row from the player in the `players` table, also known as a foreign key. I recommend you learn more about MySQL before starting to work on this kind of system.
Yeah I was trying to make it simple. But of course it would be more efficient to have an identity on PlayerTable and have FriendsTable reference it back
