SQL Server many-to-many design recommendation

Posted by Jean-Philippe Brabant on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Jean-Philippe Brabant
Published on 2010-05-09T20:14:45Z Indexed on 2010/05/09 20:18 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 231

I have a SQL Server database with two table : Users and Achievements. My users can have multiple achievements so it a many-to-many relation.

At school we learned to create an associative table for that sort of relation. That mean creating a table with a UserID and an AchivementID. But if I have 500 users and 50 achievements that could lead to 25 000 row.

As an alternative, I could add a binary field to my Users table. For example, if that field contained 10010 that would mean that this user unlocked the first and the fourth achievements.

Is their other way ? And which one should I use.

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about sql-server-2005

Related posts about database