Help with query

By the looks of it you are doing it 1 query by for every friend? That unfortunately creates infamous N+1 issue, if you have 100 friends, you are doing 100 DB queries.

The simplest solution is to get all users you follow, then all users that follow you, then find the overlap in PHP side.

PHP Code:

$following = [];
$followers = [];
$followbacks = [];

// get all users that current user is friends with
$q = $this->db->select('friend_id')
    ->where('user_id', $this->session->userdata('user_id'))
    ->get($this->relationship);

foreach ($q->result() as $row) {
    $following[$row->friend_id] = $row->friend_id;
}

// get all users that follow you
$q = $this->db->select('user_id')
    ->where('friend_id', $this->session->userdata('user_id'))
    ->get($this->relationship);

foreach ($q->result() as $row) {
    $followers[$row->user_id] = $row->user_id;
}

$followbacks = array_intersect($following, $followers); 


Not exactly what I wanted but it helped me to improve some code that I had used before. Thanks tho, I may just leave my query just like that as it is not necessary....just thoufgh it could look nice on the application I'm building.

I do Front-End development most of the time