Many-to-many relationship: use associative table or delimited values in a column?

Question

Update 2009.04.24

The main point of my question is not developer confusion and what to do about it.

The point is to understand when delimite

Answer 1

The 'this is confusing to the developers' design means you have under-educated developers. It is the better relational database design - you should use it if at all possible.

If you really want to use the list structure, then use a DBMS that understands them. Examples of such databases would be the U2 (Unidata, Universe) DBMS, which are (or were, once upon a long time ago) based on the Pick DBMS. There are likely to be other similar DBMS providers.