ERD Tools Still Force Manual Junction Tables for Many-to-Many Relationships

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Relational databases cannot directly store many-to-many relationships, requiring a separate junction table that most ERD tools make users build by hand. Microsoft's SQL Server Management Studio documentation outlines six manual steps just to map a single such relationship, involving three tables and two relationship lines. This manual process introduces multiple opportunities for error, including missing composite keys, incorrectly aimed cardinality arrows, and inconsistent column naming across a schema. Popular tool dbdiagram.io only added native many-to-many syntax in June 2022, years after users began requesting the feature. The author argues that since a junction table is a mechanical consequence of a many-to-many relationship, ERD tools should generate it automatically from a single user action rather than delegating the construction to the designer.

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