Re: Advice for using integer arrays?

I'm fairly new to Postgres, and have a design issue for which an array of integers might be a good solution.  But I'd like to hear from the experts before proceeding down this path.

Essentially, I'm trying to model the relationship between a group of biological samples and their genes. Each sample (there are ~10K of them now, with more coming) will have about 30,000 genes. Conversely, a particular gene may be present in almost all samples.

So I've created the following table to handle the many-to-many relationship:

 create table sample_gene (id serial, sample_id int, gene_id int);

 create table sample_gene_array (id serial, sample_id int, gene_id int [] );

So now the table data looks like this:

sample_id    |    gene_id []
---------------------------------------
1                 |      [1:30475]
2                 |      [1:29973]
etc.