How to model a database with many m:n relations on a table

Question

I am currently setting up a database which has a large number of many-to-many relations. Every relationship was modeled via a link table. Example:

A person has a num

Answer 1

I do not think the second method is correct because your Person_Attributes table would contain redundant data. For example: say a person likes 10 restaurants and works on 2 jobs, has 3 houses you would have as many as 10*2*3 entries where it should be 10 + 2 + 3(in 3 link tables...as per approach#1). Think of drawbacks having million users and if you had more than 3 attributes in Person_Attributes table to handle... so I would go with approach 1 in your question.

Say for example your Person_Attributes table has following entry:

personId | houseId | jobId | restaurantId
------------------------------------------
P1      H1  J1  R1

now if the person likes restaurants R2 and R3...table looks like

P1      H1      J1      R1
P2      H1      J1      R2
P2      H1      J1      R3

table already has redundant data he adds Job J2 at a later point.. your table will look like

P1      H1      J1      R1
P2      H1      J1      R2
P2      H1      J1      R3
P1      H1      J2      R1
P2      H1      J2      R2
P2      H1      J2      R3

Now consider he adds another home H2.. so on and so forth...Do you see my point?