Quote:
Originally Posted by ixtab
For the technically inclined: Think of the book <-> collection relation as an n:m relation in a database. And - guess what - that's exactly what it (logically) is in the underlying SQLite database. Except that the people who implemented it might want to revisit their cs1xx course material (Introduction to Databases), because they must have been in a coma during the normalization part of the lecture. The database actually does it in the worst possible way for an n:m relation, namely using NF˛ at both ends of the relation. |
Probably more robust, though, than using the technically "better" solution of a link table. Link tables are prone to getting broken if things go awry. Performance is probably also better, because you can do queries without (or with fewer) table joins. A lot of my "day job" work is with databases, and we often end up with a certain degree of denormalisation for both the reasons I've mentioned.