MySQL 1,000's of OR Statements (Good Idea?)

Question

I'm building a Twitter application that grabs a users entire following and gets their specific id Ex: 1223455

I also have a huge database full of rows that contain a specific Twitter id... Look at the examples in rows...

|1| 122345   |
|2| 2232144  |
|3| 99653222 |
|4| 123232   |
|5| 2321323  |
|6| 3121322  |

The problem is we all know that Twitter is all about more and more followers (1,000's), and I was wonder is this is a good MySQL query to run potentially up to 20 times in one script run...

SELECT * FROM table WHERE twitterID='132323' OR twitterId='23123' OR twitterId='23123' OR twitterId='23123' OR twitterId='23123' OR twitterId='23123' OR twitterId='23123' OR twitterId='23123

And on and on and on and on... There could potentially be over 1,000 OR statements in a single query (and a similar query like this could be called 20 times)

This doesn't seem like a very good programming practice, but I haven't heard of another way...??

Answer 1

Use the in specifier:

Select * from table where twitterid in (123,456,789,...)

Answer 2

This is a very bad idea indeed. MySQL doesn't do a good job with optimizing OR statements.

You'd be far better off using a JOIN or something like this

WHERE twitterId IN (
      select * 
        from followers
       where followee = whatever
)