Re: transitive closure
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 13:01:49 GMT
Message-ID: <1R6De.5913$oZ.2820_at_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.