Xrhrft

I need to implement basic personalized user functionality for my website. Is there a standard structure for databases of this type? Like is it common practice to have all user info and data in a single table with each user having his own row, or should this info be split among different tables and linked together (maybe for efficiency?) I'm not tremendously concerned with security at this point, but I'll obviously want to have password encryption before too long.

I tried to find what I was looking for on google, but to no avail. Just let me know if the question needs further clarification or anything.

I suggest that you use typical normalization standards. One user per row.

• User ID (incrementing bigint)


• User Common Name (to be displayed on
  the site)


• User Email Address


• Password Salt (Unique for every user, inserted when the account is created)


• Password (Hashed with the salt - MD5 or SHA1, your preference)


• Date Account Was Created

The rest is up to you given your business rules.

Going to have to go for a big old fashion "it depends".

Of course you are going to need some sort of key on this table. You could start off with a UserID. This could just be a incrementing INT (or bigint if you are going to have over 2.1 million users).

I've seen lots of databases also use GUIDs as the main UserID. But that's opening a whole different can of worms using GUIDs for PKs.

You then need to decide how normalized you want your database. Are you going to allow your user to have multiple emails? multiple phone numbers? If so, they should be in a different table.

I'd keep the main user table to:

• some sort of ID or PK you can use


• First Name/Last Name or just a username


• some sort of status of the user (active, disabled, etc) - (tinyint linking to a status table)


• created date

That should be your starting point.

From there you could add other columns based on what you want to store. Email could link to an email table, address to an address table, etc. Password could use hash+salt but have you considered openids?

I HIGHLY recommend you read this article though - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/data-modeling/71725/

Check out this answer where the poster goes through each field and discusses what you might want to do with the field. This can help you work out if you need to have tables linked for flexibility for business requirements, or reporting.

Best practices on common person fields (Name, email, address, gender etc...)

If it is about authentication of users, I would use LDAP. Do not create a separate database for the users, if you already use a database and have other tables (orders, products, etc). You may want to join these tables.

We can add last login date, maximum number of login attempts, and active status