Store Friend relations

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Hi,

i am trying to figure out how to store a friend relation beetween my users.

1.
I thought about using arrays, store for each user an array containing all its friends. But i don't know if arrays are suported in MySQL:
-> if they weren't i could also do a string which is the result of friends concatenation. But maybe it would be to much work to explode and implode the content at each time a user wants to get a list of its friends.


2.
then i thought about using a simple paired relation:
user1 is friend with user2 and the relation status: -1 for friends, -0 for friendship requested
so table would be:

user1 | user2 | status
paul  | john  | 0
paul  | ron   | 1
jimi  | paul  | 1
 

ok so when the user requests to be friend of an other one, i insert his name in "user1" and the requested friend in "user2"
Example:
paul asked john to be his friend. -> 0 ->friendship not confirmed yet
paul asked ron to be his friend-> 1 ->friendship confirmed, updated 0->1

This would work fine if:
before i insert a friendship request into the table, i look into "user1" coulumn.

if(there is a record of the requesting user into user1){
     insert into coulumn user1
}
else{
    insert into column 2
}

this would prevent "friends" table from having the same user name(in fact: id) into the 2 different columns, as i have in the Table example above.
-> john is either on user1 and user2 columns.

THE Question is :
isn't that to much work to perform for a simple friend request insertion?

3.
the other possibility which extends this last one, is not to perform the check at insertion, but then check on select into the two columns:

Example, john wants to see his friends:

SELECT user1 and user2
FROM friends
WHERE user1 = john OR user2 = john 
 

then i should reorder the resultng array..


Experts, what do you think i should do?

Thankyou very much

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