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Assuming this needs to be optimized for massive scale, just hash the values to a single indexed field.

And use something other than an RDBMS. Put the hash in Redis and expire the key; your code simply does an existence check for the hash. You could probably handle gmail with a big enough cluster.

That super-normalized schema looks terrible.

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I too recommend using Redis in 2002.

Fair enough, but I think the issue here is recognizing that the underlying business operation is a hit test on an expiring hash key. You could have used MySQL as a key/value store or looked for something more specialized.

“Hash it and store in BerkeleyDB” would have been a ridiculously easy solution at the time.

++ correct answer here

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