What’s the most efficient database method to add and query usermeta?

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What’s the most efficient way – concerning the database – to add and query extra usermeta fields to a profile?

I need to add four additional fields of numeric and text data to a user profile and then query that to compile the data for display in a template. And there are potentially thousands of users.

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There are lots of examples to store the data in usermeta. But should this amount of data be stored in the usermeta table?

Or should I store it all in a new database table? And if so, how do I initialize a new table and then write to it?

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  1. There are lots of examples to store the data in usermeta. But should
    this amount of data be stored in the usermeta table?

    I don’t see any reason why you should not use the default user meta data table, after-all that is what it is for, regardless of the amount of users/fields.

    The user meta function , such as get user meta uses get_metadata with the $meta_type object set to user. http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_metadata

    If you want to mess around with new tables you can use the $wpdb class and create a new one, this post covers how, http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_Tables_with_Plugins .

    There is also a plugin called Pods CMS that allows for the creation of custom database tables for content types, but unless you have a specific reason for doing so, just use the built in user meta tables.

  2. I have a Website (well a client of mine has it) which has just over 5000 users and for each user we store 9 different meta fields (rows) in the usermeta table and i really can’t see any problems with that, i will add that 6 of these meta fields are actually arrays of data that hold from 4 to 13 different values (Integer, String and Boolean) so in most cases we only make one get_user_meta() call for all needed values of that page. and the other 3 fields are fields that we need to query by so they can’t be in an array.

    So overall each user has 80-96 custom fields which are all stored in 9 rows.

    Now after that being said using a custom table will be faster (simple fact) but is it worth the trouble?