Dumb Database schema / EOModeler questions...

Hi all,

I'm working on a "social news" application written in WO, and am
currently in the process of modeling my database (we're going to use
FrontBase).  As I am not an expert at database modeling / creating
scalable solutions - embarrassingly bad, to tell you the truth - I
wanted to get some perspectives from the people on the list regarding
what they'd do.  My proposed implementations seem awfully simplistic,
which leads me to believe that they won't scale ...

Basically, we have three tables: USER, FRIEND, STORY; what I want to
figure out is...

- What is the most efficient way to set up the FRIEND table?  Assuming
that when a user first asks to be a friend of another user, the
connection remains pending until the other user confirms (thus meaning
all USER.friends relationships are bi-directional), should I have
things set up so that FRIEND is as such:

FRIEND
======
friendId - LONGINT, Primary Key
userId - LONGINT, Foreign Key
user2Id - LONGINT, Foreign Key
approved - BOOLEAN

owner - relationship to USER: FRIEND.userId + USER.userId
friend - relationship to USER: FRIEND.user2Id + USER.userId

.. with an approval by the other user meaning that another FRIEND
entry for their relationship?  I am assuming that two transactions /
table entries are very inefficient, and that this will cause problems
for me later on, but that's the best solution I could think of.

Now, assuming that we have USERs and USER.friends .. Say we have the
following STORY table:

STORY
======
storyId - LONGINT, Primary Key
userId - LONGINT, Foreign Key
body - CLOB
approvedByEditor - BOOLEAN

author - relationship to USER: STORY.userId + USER.userId

.. How would one fetch all of the stories posted by the friends of a
user in the most efficient manner?  My avoidance of reading a proper
database modeling book has caused me to be incapable of even beginning
to figure this out, let alone figure out how I would model it in
EOModeler (blame the US education system...).  I also need to figure
out how to fetch an array that contains both a user's friend's
stories, and stories that are marked approvedByEditor, with no
duplication; again, no clue how I would do this in EOModeler (which I
hadn't used in about 4 years, until this week)...

Hope you guys can help ...

Numair