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My question is more advisory than technical. I'm writing a Facebook app in which I am fetching some information about the user, including facebook_id.
I was wondering if I should keep the user id as INT or VARCHAR in the MySQL database?
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An int is usually better, because it gives better performance. If your item has a natural key which is a varchar, you could use that and it will work. But you will get a performance improvement (and some other benefits) by adding a surrogate key that is an integer.
Everyone on Facebook has a user ID number, created when they joined. The numbers aren't strictly sequential: the first few million are segmented by university, so that Harvard users were assigned 0-99999, Columbia users 100000-199999, Stanford users 200000-299999, and so on.
Your User ID is a string of numbers that doesn't personally identify you but does connect to your Facebook profile. You have a User ID automatically, whether or not you choose to create a username. Learn how to find your user ID.
Facebook uses 64-bit integers (bigint) for their user ids. So you use Bigint UNSIGNED in MySQL.
"As a reminder, in the very near future, we will be rolling out 64 bit user IDs. We encourage you to test your applications by going to www.facebook.com/r.php?force_64bit and create test accounts with 64 bit UIDs."
Edit: Facebook usernames is not the same thing as the user id. The username is of course varchar but will not be returned as the id.
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Although unlikely, facebook could change the format of their ID's, so to make it future proof, I'd use a varchar.
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