this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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Benefits of a join table vs. array to express relations? (outside of SQL) (lemy.lol)
submitted 6 months ago by matcha_addict@lemy.lol to c/programming@programming.dev
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I am building an application that is using JSON / XML files to persist data. This is why I indicated "outside of SQL" in the title.

I understand one benefit of join tables is it makes querying easier with SQL syntax. Since I am using JSON as my storage, I do not have that benefit.

But are there any other benefits when using a separate join table when expressing a many-to-many relationship? The exact expression I want to express is one entity's dependency on another. I could do this by just having a "dependencies" field, which would be an array of the IDs of the dependencies.

This approach seems simpler to me than a separate table / entity to track the relation. Am I missing something?

Feel free to ask for more context.

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[โ€“] talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Not sure I'm getting the issue here (what does "join table" mean in the scope of JSON/XML?), but... doesn't how you lay out your data in JSON/XML file have zero impact in your application's queries? You won't be querying the JSON - you'll be loading data from it into memory and query the memory.

[โ€“] matcha_addict@lemy.lol 1 points 6 months ago

I am simulating a database table as a json list. So a join table would be simulated also as a separate list (or separate json file).