Which attitude to choose?

Question

Database design

Let's say you can put an article in different categories, then is it better to make a separate table for this and use a many-to-many relationship?
Or do one-to-many without a pivot table?

Answer 1

you can put an article in different categories <...> one to many

Have you tried to imagine it? If one to many, and an article can belong to different categories, then the category itself can contain only one article. That is, it is not a category at all. So many to many, no options.

Answer 2

Depending on how you want, if there is one category for one post, then you don’t need it, but if there is one post for several, then you need it through the pivot