Implementing trees in a relational database

From: Paul DeWolf <paul_at_thievesandkings.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 03:30:34 GMT
Message-ID: <uLn19.179675$Wt3.134644_at_rwcrnsc53>



Hi all,

I used to work in the application development area of a very large company who built applications on top of very complex data models using a very large relational database vendor.

We had various networks (recursive many-to-many relationships) that were stored in the database through "connectivity" tables, but it was *extremely* awkward to develop the software both on the application and database sides and it seemed that we had real scalability and performance problems, especially as we wanted to add to the data model.

Since then I've moved to working for an object-oriented database company where these relationships are quite easy to develop and scale easily, but I'm still curious about how one can implement trees and networks in an RDBMS. Can someone point me to information (books, white papers) on techniques for efficiently implementing trees and networks in an RDBMS? Has anyone done it themselves and showed that they can scale linearly?

Paul DeWolf
Systems Engineer
Objectivity, Inc. Received on Tue Jul 30 2002 - 05:30:34 CEST

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