Karen Lopez - InfoAdvisors (3/2/2010)
Oddly enough, I'm getting lots of push back from developers these days that having such tables is "bad design". I'm trying to track down a source for this "knowledge". What devs are telling me is that the real world does not have many-to-many relationships and that these are just artifacts of a designer trying to push relational theory onto a non-relational world. I don't see that
You should point out to your devs that relational theory is perfectly happy with one-many, many-one, and many-many relationships, so if they know how to do it without a many-many relationship they can perfectly well express it in a relational way without using many-many relationships - challenge them to try to express group membership in English without describing a many to many relationship - when they fail they may realise that this is not an artifact of the sort they imagine.
What I enjoyed about this article is the "confession" part that showed how a bad design can get one into trouble. Articles should have such anti-patterns to show that there's a reason why something is a better solution.
Yes, that was the best bit of the article.
Tom