Database structure suggestion (serialization or separate table)

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I am currently making a database, and truth to be told I'm not exactly very good at it (kinda being forced to do it). Its a game database, and I have a table called game_table that I use for storing game sessions that users create.

The question is, what is the best way to store a list of invited users, requested users, confirmed users, declined users and pending users? Currently I am serializing the user IDs (e.g. invited users = "11235|2510|34630|45715|64530"). However, the main problem is that the field becomes not searchable, and it becomes a problem if I want to retrieve a list of games that a user is invited to. To solve that problem, I store a separate field in the user_table for invited_games (also serialized game IDs).

The problem with that, is that it is getting hard to maintain whenever I want to add new features, and it is too easy to make mistakes with keeping the serialized data in sync. Is it better to have separate tables like:

invited_users_table

Game_ID | User_ID

51 | 5193

51 | 10458

51 | 235

901 | 1536

901 | 4573

Or is there some other better way of storing these types of data? Please help, and thanks!

asked 36 secs ago

Justin Leo

18