Re: transitive closure

From: David Cressey <david.cressey_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 13:01:49 GMT
Message-ID: <1R6De.5913$oZ.2820@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net>

"Marshall Spight" <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:1121728087.978125.282060_at_g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

> Anyone have any experience with Oracle's CONNECT BY?
> Is it the right abstraction? Too narrow? Too broad?
> Does it work well?

Oracle's CONNECT BY has worked well for me, at a very practical level. However, I prefer to think of it as a PROCESS tool than as a DATA tool. If I want the classical model of child parent relationships, I'll use a foreign key to the parent. If I want the processing benefits of nested sets, I'll use nested sets.

And if I want to be able to traverse a tree that's represented by a child-parent foreign key, I'll use CONNECT BY. I know it's recursive internally. But I don't have to think recursively to use it.

I'm not as concerned about portability as Joe Celko is. Received on Tue Jul 19 2005 - 08:01:49 CDT