Facebook mutual friends and FQL 4999/5000 record l

Question

I'm trying to select all mutual friends' connections with PHP/FQL. Using my UID (540 friends), which means >12,000 connections, of which >6500 are unique. So this code should return all the connections but Facebook apparently has a 4999/5000 row limit on FQL queries.

// select mutual unique friends
 $unique_connections = $facebook->api_client->fql_query("

  SELECT uid1, uid2 FROM friend 
   WHERE uid1 IN 
   (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1=$uid)
   AND uid2 IN 
   (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1=$uid)
 ");

I know the numbers above because the original code I wrote loops through my friend list and sends a getMutualFriend query for each of them.

foreach ($friends as $key) 
{
    $mutual_friends = $facebook->api_client->friends_getMutualFriends($key);
    foreach ($mutual_friends as $f_uid)
    {
        array_push($all_connections, array($key,$f_uid)); 
    }
}

Of course it takes almost 3 minutes to run that script, while the FQL query returns in 5 seconds. After an hour of searching for this answer I've come to the conclusion the only way to get around this is to use a mixture of the two methods. Well that, and post here. Any ideas on a better way to write this script and beat the 4999/5000 row limit?

Here's an fql_multiquery that should do the same as above. It is also limited to 4999/5000.

$queries = '{
"user_friends":"SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = '.$uid.'",
"mutual_friends":"SELECT uid1, uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 IN (SELECT uid2 FROM #user_friends) AND uid2 IN (SELECT uid2 FROM #user_friends)"
}';

$mq_test = $facebook->api_client->fql_multiquery(trim($queries));
print_r($mq_test);

Answer 1

One trick it seems i was able to use is to limit the no of queries based on one of the indexable columns from your tables ( using strpos(column_name, character / number)) .

ex:

$fql = "SELECT pid,src_big,owner FROM photo WHERE album_object_id IN 
      (SELECT object_id FROM privacy WHERE 
             ( object_id IN ( SELECT object_id FROM album WHERE owner IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE 
                   ( uid1 = " . $this->nextUser->fbid . " AND **strpos(uid2,2) = 1**  )))                                   
           AND ( value = 'FRIENDS_OF_FRIENDS' OR value = 'EVERYONE'  ) )) ;

And this way you can split it in 10 subqueries, or for a alphnumeric field in 33.