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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

It depends entirely on how you want to work with the data.

Have you considered sqlite? The database is just a single file, which gives you all the advantages of a text file (easy backup, sharing, easy editing via sqlite browser) while also providing the benefits of SQL when operating on the data (join, etc).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Sqlite is nice but the file would not be readable in a plaintext-like format from my understanding.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

  1. Yes, but devil's advocate: you also need a program to text files, needing a program to read sqlite files is not worse.

  2. I am confused by your requirements. Why do you need to store your data as json or XML? Would it suit your requirements to read in text files, convert to sqlite for processing and then save as a text file? What do you gain by being able to edit the files in a text editor, as opposed to a table editor? Do you maybe just need a config file (e.g. in toml format) and don't actually do much data processing?