ruby on rails database design

Question

I am using devise for authentication and i have added some user-personal fields which i am not sure is the correct way to continue developing my app and is the proper database design...

users   CREATE TABLE `users` (
 `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 `email` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
 `encrypted_password` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
 `reset_password_token` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `reset_password_sent_at` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
 `remember_created_at` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
 `sign_in_count` int(11) DEFAULT '0',
 `current_sign_in_at` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
 `last_sign_in_at` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
 `current_sign_in_ip` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `last_sign_in_ip` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `created_at` datetime NOT NULL,
 `updated_at` datetime NOT NULL,
 `username` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
 `twitter` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
 `facebook` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
 `location` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
 `website` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
 `name` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
 `bio` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
 UNIQUE KEY `index_users_on_email` (`email`),
 UNIQUE KEY `username` (`username`),
 UNIQUE KEY `index_users_on_reset_password_token` (`reset_password_token`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=2 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

should i create another table and store the personal fields of the user such as

• twitter
• facebook
• location
• website
• name
• bio

or its fine to keep them as they are currently?

Answer 1

I would abstract those attributes out to a different table. Maybe create a 'Profile' table where you can keep things like this. Then a User would belongs_to Profile, and a Profile has_one User.

Answer 2

You should check the database normalization . location, website, name and bio are columns where redundant data can appear, but I would hazard the consequences of denormalization, so you don't need a JOIN-Statement to link two tables, which is faster than linking them.