Many to Many Association Tables - Is it customary to put additional columns in these tables?

Posted by Randy Minder on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Randy Minder
Published on 2010-03-24T14:20:31Z Indexed on 2010/03/24 14:23 UTC
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sql-server

We've encountered the following situation in our database. We have table 'A' and table 'B' which have a M2M relationship. The association table is named 'AB' and contains a FK column to table 'A' and a FK column to table 'B'. Now we've identified a need to store additional data about this association. For example, a date when the association occurred, and who made the association etc. We've decided to put these additional columns in the 'AB' association table. However, something tells me this is frowned upon by database purists. On the other hand, it makes no sense to us to create yet an additional table to store this associated data.

What's the prevailing thought on this?

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