Handling many-to-many relationship from existing database using Django ORM

Question

I'm starting to work with Django, already done some models, but always done that with 'code-first' approach, so Django handled the table creations etc. Right now I'm integrating an already existing database with ORM and I encountered some problems.

Database has a lot of many-to-many relationships so there are quite a few tables linking two other tables. I ran inspectdb command to let Django prepare some models for me. I revised them, it did rather good job guessing the fields and relations, but the thing is, I think I don't need those link tables in my models, because Django handles many-to-many relationships with ManyToManyField fields, but I want Django to use that link tables under the hood.

So my question is: Should I delete the models for link tables and add ManyToManyFields to corresponding models, or should I somehow use this models?

I don't want to somehow mess-up database structure, it's quite heavy populated.

I'm using Postgres 9.5, Django 2.2.

Answer 1

In many cases it doesn't matter. If you would like to keep the code minimal then m2m fields are a good way to go. If you don't control the database structure it might be worth keeping the inspectdb schema in case you have to do it again after schema changes that you don't control. If the m2m link tables can grow properties of their own then you need to keep them as models.