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