I have lots of experience building AppSheet apps with many-to-many relationships using a bridge table. I’m set on using this method in general, so I don’t need help there.
I’ve also tried doing it using EnumLists, which seems easier to setup. But I’ve found that less robust as sometimes I like to add additional metadata (e.g. which user added the bridge row, or when it was added). I would also guess it’s slower when looking up reverse references, but I’d love to hear from someone who knows for sure.
My question is: suppose you have Table A, Table B and Table C, which all have many-to-many relationships between each other. From an AppSheet performance perspective, is it more efficient to create 3 bridge tables or to create 1 bridge table with 3 columns, one for each of the A, B and C refs?
Since “the point” is not the bridge table itself, but pairing rows from the respective tables it would certainly seem cleaner/easier to setup than having many many-to-many bridge tables. Once you get up to relationships between 4 tables you would need 6 bridge tables, 5 you need 10, etc. But my concern is if there’s some kind of performance “catch” that would make this unfeasible.