Question

I am trying to define some MySQL relations. I have 3 tables as given below:

     employee:
     | id | first_name | last_name | email

     notifications: (notification names are email, post etc)
     | id | name             | description

     employee_notifications:
     | id | employee_id | notification_id |

Is there any advantage (or disadvantage) in changing the employee_notifications table to insert all notification ids of an employee in one row using json_encode?

As of now, there are like 100 employees and 6 notification methods.

Answer 1

Is there any advantage (or disadvantage) in changing the employee_notifications table to insert all notification ids of an employee in one row using json_encode?

There are significant disadvantages. With your current setup, you can easily find out which notifications an employee has, or which employees subscribe to a particular notification. Putting it as JSON in the employees table is going to remove your ability to do that.