How can I create a Message
table such as this in mySQL where it stores messages and their responses?
You can try this:
create table messages (
message_id int primary key,
response_to int null references messages(message_id), -- self relationship
user_from int not null references users(user_id),
user_to int not null references users(user_id),
content varchar(200) not null
);
The first message will have a null
value un response_to
field.
As a side note, if you are planning to store "conversations" instead of "messages", consider a plain table with a CLOB (character large object) to store a JSON or XML representation of the conversation. It will speed up your queries (if you are always planning to read the entire conversation at once instead of individual messages).