Many to many and junction table

[Cedric_Gepner]

Hello,

I’m building a table to track sales and inventory. Each product has a number of components, and sales/resupplies impact the total inventory of components.
For instance
chair 1 = 1 wood structure + 1 leather canvas
chair 2 = 1 wood structure + 1 velvet canvas
So a product can have multiple components, and a single component can be found in different products. I think this qualifies as a many to many relationship, as explained by the airtable guide.
I built a quick prototype, and managed to do so without using a junction table, and it seems to work just fine. Why is that? By bypassing the junction table, am i missing something that might become a problem down the road?

You’ll find the table in read only here: Sign up - Airtable

thanks
cedric

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

No, your setup is fine.

You have setup a one-to-many relationship there.

It only becomes a problem if you need to individually track information about each individual component AS IT RELATES TO AN INDIVIDUAL PRODUCT.

For example, if you need to keep track of specific information about the very specific “velvet canvas” that is very specifically being used for “chair 2” only.

Only under those circumstances would you need to create a many-to-many relationship.

Otherwise, a one-to-many relationship is fine.