Simon Willison’s Weblog

Is a relational database with many-to-many relationships difficult to develop into a web app?

8th February 2011

My answer to Is a relational database with many-to-many relationships difficult to develop into a web app? on Quora

Many to Many tables can be a bit of a pain to deal with using regular SQL, but a good ORM can abstract away any potential complexity almost entirely. I find using the Django ORM means I’m much less likely to shy away from a design that involves a many-to-many relationship because I know it won’t increase the complexity of the application. I imagine the Rails ORM has the same effect.