Help designing database for a twitter web application

Question

Hello.

I'm trying to create a small website in ASP.NET MVC that uses twitter. I want to be able to pull some information about twitter users and store it in a database, which I will update periodically.

I am using the following tables:

Users
user_id - uses the twitter id (int)
twitter_name - nvarchar(255)
last_updated - datetime

TwitterData
user_id
date
num_tweets
num_favorites
num_lists

Unfortunately I'm not really good with databases, so is this a good design? Can I use one table instead?

Thanks in advance, Sasha

Answer 1

If there is a 1-1 relationship between a record in Users and a record in TwitterData, then you could use a single table. If you were going to have other kinds of data (FacebookData, for example), then you'd keep the two tables, but probably move twitter_name to TwitterData.

Read this for an introduction to Normalization, which will help you get started in designing tables.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database%5Fnormalization

Answer 2

That looks like a good start to me. You can use the Twitter API as a model for your data schema.

If you are wanting to store normalized data I would go with a separate table for Users and their Tweets.