As I've seen in many SO questions and answer seem to point out that reciprocal reference may be an indication of bad design and how it would open a can of worms down the line.
But, what exactly would the alternative solution to solve a problem like below?
Say for example, if I have a group table and a user table.
I have a FK in either table of this one-to-many relationship. I may...
- query on the user table, i can join by FK to check group attributes.
- query on group, i can see, say I have a column that indicates last_joined_user_id which could be null or not. From there I could join to get more detail of the last user by FK.
As such, I feel like this design gives me the flexibility to quickly join table between the two.
Is this example I've given safe to use? Or it's still problematic?