title: Many-to-Many relationships needing an associate table
body: <p>In many database design tutorials/articles, they always bring up the fact that if two tables share a many-to-many relationship, then a third table should be created to act as an associate table to link the two.</p>
  
  <p><strong><em>However</em></strong>, they never provide the reason <strong>WHY</strong> we should do it that way. I'm curious to know <strong><em>why</em></strong> and examples of <strong><em>problems that could occur</em></strong> if you just kept the two tables as it is without the associate table.</p>