Nested Sets And Pedigrees

From: drop the numbers <123tiseo.paul_at_123mayo.edu>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 18:27:42 GMT
Message-ID: <MPG.171665ac4cbcd2559896d7@news.easynews.com>

Can nested sets (such as Celko's material sometimes posted here) be used for pedigree charting? There are confounding issues, the biggest of which are:

A set of child nodes has two parent nodes.
The two parent nodes aren't necessarily on the level right above the child nodes. For example, a node that has a nested set below it may also have another set below that that involves a node from the level in between. (This implies father/mother fathered/mothered with his/her child, and yes it's rare, but we've already seen it in one of our genetics families.)

The other issue is that the edge needs to be defined. For example, given a set of nodes that all have the same parents, one relation is "father", the other is "mother". Sometimes, you might have data where you don't have the "father" relation, but you know the "grandfather". Would it be best to store this in a separate table?

(Any opinions expressed are strictly mine only and not my employer's)

Paul Tiseo, Intermediate Systems Programmer Reply To: 123tiseo.paul_at_123mayo.edu (drop the numbers) Received on Thu Apr 04 2002 - 12:27:42 CST