this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
32 points (94.4% liked)

Programming

17303 readers
53 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe
Ategon
[email protected]
32
Benefits of a join table vs. array to express relations? (outside of SQL) (lemy.lol)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming
22 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 5 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€“] [email protected] 1 points 5 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).