Database schema for messaging to multiple users

Question

I\'m looking for the best solution to implement messaging to multiple users within the system(Facebook-style).

I\'m came up with the following idea: where each Message

Answer 1

The schema should work just fine as long as there aren't too many recipients of the same message. I don't see how you could make it much smaller or more efficient.

The only performance problem I can see is that if you want to do broadcasting, that is, send the same message to a large group or, say, every user on the system. Sending such a message will be very slow (been there, done that). In that case, I would track the status of such global messages lazily, that is, create the status row for an individual user only after he has opened the message. But if you don't have such a feature planned, I'd say ignore this problem for now.

Answer 2

My solution is to avoid the massive data storage by using more programming to determine which message goes to whom.

For example if you want to send a message to all users of the system, you place a "" in the usr_id column, and then programmmatically you could fetch all messages where the usr_id = current_usr_id OR ''. Then you could do a variety of filters and come up with your own syntax for creating messager_user lists without database storage.

Seems like a trade-off between processing/storage ...