Providing initial data for a many-to-many table in Django - mysql

Question

I want to clarify the format of providing initial data in raw SQL for a Django model that uses a many to many relationship. I've based my query on this example. I know I'm not required to specify the through parameter in ManyToManyField for this case, but I would like to have the table listed explicitly.
Backend db is MySQL & table names are lowercase Class names.
Model :
class Person(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
class Group(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
members = models.ManyToManyField(Person, through='Membership')
class Membership(models.Model):
person = models.ForeignKey(Person)
group = models.ForeignKey(Group)
I suppose the correct way to provide data would be :
INSERT INTO person VALUES ('Ringo Starr')
INSERT INTO person VALUES ('Paul McCartney')
INSERT INTO group VALUES ('The Beatles')
INSERT INTO membership VALUES (1, 1)
INSERT INTO membership VALUES (2, 1)
How will I specify this data if I did not declare the Membership table explicitly and didn't use the through parameter? Is the following correct?
INSERT INTO person VALUES ('Ringo Starr')
INSERT INTO person VALUES ('Paul McCartney')
INSERT INTO group VALUES ('The Beatles', 1)
INSERT INTO group VALUES ('The Beatles', 1)
UPDATE : The second method isn't correct. The members field under Group class isn't a real dB column.

Answer 1

Short answer:
The correct way to do it in SQL is the same as when you use through, but the table that was membership before will either have a name generated by Django like person_group_a425b, or a name you specify with the db_table parameter on Group.members.
More details:
Even if you don't make a model explicitly for the table that joins them together, Django will create a join table for them.
From the Django docs about how the table is named:
Behind the scenes, Django creates an intermediary join table to represent the
many-to-many relationship. By default, this table name is generated using the name of
the many-to-many field and the name of the table for the model that contains it. Since
some databases don’t support table names above a certain length, these table names will
be automatically truncated to 64 characters and a uniqueness hash will be used. This
means you might see table names like author_books_9cdf4; this is perfectly normal.
You can provide a shorter/different name for the join table in the definition of the ManyToManyfield, using the db_table option.