: @Ethan: so there will be a table will all the connections, like: user_id, connected_user_id, depth_degree which will have all the connected nodes... eg. user A has: user B and user C as first

@Ethan : so there will be a table will all the connections, like: user_id, connected_user_id, depth_degree
which will have all the connected nodes... eg.

user A has: user B and user C as first degree
user B has: user A, user D and user E as first degree
user C has: user A as first degree
user D has: user B and user F as first degree

in the table there will be:

user A, user B, 1
user A, user C, 1
User A, user D, 2
user A, user E, 2
user A, user F, 3
user B, user A, 1
user B, user D, 1
user B, user E, 1
user B, user F, 2
user C, user A, 1
user D, user B, 1
user D, user F, 1
....

right? wouldn't be this a lot of records in order to keep all the connections of the graph? imagine just one million of users, with like 200 first degrees the result table will have billions of records
@Thomas : I'll surely read your post and look more into hadoop, thanks

Do you think that it would work on a nosql database (mongodb/couchdb)?

Thank you both :)

(btw i think too that stackoverflow is a better place for this topic)