I'm on a planning process for my business website which will be something pretty similar to Facebook in term of user profile which will keep tons of user's information. I've had a programming and database background and not afraid to learn the new things from the root even it does take time. As I've decided to use PHP, Javascript, CSS, and MySql for my project, my questions are:

- How to deal with large amount of database, for example a record of user profile which can contain tons of information (will have hundreds or thousands of fields)?
- How to store and retrieve the data?
- Is it normally kept as a long text with separator?
- What is the best book in the market or website could guide me step-by-step or something pretty close to my job teaching me how to deal with this thing: keep user profile, from the beginning till the end?
- How does Facebook or any Online dating site store their data?
- Please give me the list of the best books required in each subject for this project.