Hi All,

I'm a web developer and have recently started a project with a company. Currently, I'm working with their DBA on getting the schema laid out for the site, and we've come to a disagreement regarding the design on a couple tables, and I'd like some opinions on the matter.

Basically, we are working on a site that will implement a "friends" network. All users of the site will be contained in a table tblUsers with (PersonID int identity PK, etc).

What I am wanting to do is to create a second table, tblNetwork, that will hold all of the relationships between users, with (NetworkID int identity PK, Owners_PersonID int FK, Friends_PersonID int FK, etc). Or conversely, remove the NetworkID, and have both the Owners_PersonID and Friends_PersonID shared as the Primary key.

This is where the DBA has his problem. Saying that "he would only implement this kind of architecture in a data warehousing schema, and not for a website, and this is just another example of web developers trying to take the easy way out."

Now obviously, his remark was a bit inflammatory, and that have helped motivate me to find an suitable answer, but more so, I'd just like to know how to do it right. I've been developing databases and programming for over 10 years, have worked with some top-notch minds, and have never heard this kind of argument.

What the DBA is wanting to do is instead of storing both the Owners_PersonId and Friends_PersonId in the same table, is to create a third table tblFriends to store the Friends_PersonId, and have the tblNetwork have (NetworkID int identity PK, Owner_PersonID int FK, FriendsID int FK(from TBLFriends)). All that tblFriends would house would be (FriendsID int identity PK, Friends_PersonID(related back to Persons)).

To me, creating the third table is just excessive in nature, and does nothing but create an alias for the Friends_PersonID, and cause me to have to add (what I view as unneeded) joins to all my queries, not to mention the extra cycles that will be necessary to perform the join on every query.

Thanks for reading, appreciate comments.

Ryan