A request to get a Twitter feed like? - mysql

Question

How does Twitter (or Facebook) do to retrieve a user feed?
Here is the database schema I am working on. I renamed everything to look like twitter hoping that the most of you would understand my question...
I only have two resources: users and tweets. So here are those two tables:
users:
- id
- username
tweets:
- id
- author_id
- content
Let's continue with a simple pivot table to associate tweets and users:
user_tweet:
- user_id
- tweet_id
- created_at
This pivot table is here mainly to store the retweets. But it also stores the original tweets for more convenience.
For example, let's take user 1 tweets 'something'. user 2 and user 3 retweet. The user_tweet table will have three rows.
And, let's see a last table that complicates everything: The Following System.
Every user can follow an other user. I named the table "followee_follower":
followee_follower:
- followee_id
- follower_id
The followee_id is the user.id of the person being followed
The follower_id is the user.id of the person that follows an other one
Now let's get to the SQL problem:
I'm user 1. I follow user 2, and user 3.
How can I retrieve the tweets and retweets from user 2 and user3 knowing that I want to retrieve them ordering them by the created_at field of the user_tweet table, and that I don't want to get two similar tweets.
Many thanks, any help is highly nice from you,
Have a good day/night.
EDIT: Here are some samples data from tables:
users table
tweets table
user_tweet table
followee_follower table
expected results

Answer 1

I'm not sure I completely understand your question (sample data would help), but I think you just need to use multiple joins:
select t.id, t.content, ut.created_at
from tweets t
inner join user_tweets ut on t.id = ut.tweet_id
inner join followee_follower ff on ut.user_id = ff.follower_id
where ff.followee_id = 1
order by ut.created_at
Perhaps if a user retweets, you'd want to do something like this instead to get the first tweet (assuming the id and created_at fields both should return the minimum):
select t.content, min(t.id), min(ut.created_at)
from tweets t
inner join user_tweets ut on t.id = ut.tweet_id
inner join followee_follower ff on ut.user_id = ff.follower_id
where ff.followee_id = 1
group by t.content
order by min(ut.created_at)