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Hi.. i need a suggestion, i have a two tables articles and authors. my scenario is every article have more then one author. My problem is, how to get author data with article. i know the solution with belongsToMany relationship with pivot table. is there any solution without use pivot table. Thanks..
Article_table
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| id | title | author_id |
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| 1 | title 1 | 1,2 |
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| 2 | title 2 | 3,4,5 |
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Authors_table
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| id | name |
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| 1 | name 1 |
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| 2 | name 2 |
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| 3 | name 3 |
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| 4 | name 4 |
-----------------------
The pivot table is the correct solution. You shouldn't have a column containing multiple ids. You can't index that and it will get slower and slower as the tables grow. You also can't use relationships or joins on them without a bunch of hacky workarounds because that's not how a relational database works.
its about 10 minutes work to add a pivot, followed by hours and hours of being thankful that you did
Think of it the other way. Suppose you needed to find out what books author 3 had written. How would you do that doing it your way?
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