title: How to design the user table for an online dating site?
body: <p>I'm working on the next version of a local online dating site, PHP &amp; MySQL based and I want to do things right. The user table is quite massive and is expected to grow even more with the new version as there will be a lot of money spent on promotion.</p>
  
  <p>The current version which I guess is 7-8 years old was done probably by someone not very knowledgeable in PHP and MySQL so I have to start over from scratch.</p>
  
  <p>There community has currently 200k+ users and is expected to grow to 500k-1mil in the next one or two years. There are more than 100 attributes for each user's profile and I have to be able to search by at least 30-40 of them.</p>
  
  <p>As you can imagine I'm a little wary to make a table with 200k rows and 100 columns. My predecessor split the user table in two ... one with the most used and searched columns and one with the rest (and bulk) of the columns. But this lead to big synchronization problems between the two tables.</p>
  
  <p>So, what do you think it's the best way to go about it?</p>