Re: Location Structures Approaches, Pros & Cons

Tim Marshall <TIMMY!_at_PurplePandaChasers.Moertherium> wrote:

>The other approach is one with which I am familiar for listing parent
>child relationships between various components of building equipment (a
>fan might be a child of an air handling unit, for example) rather than
>location. It's more difficult (impossible?) to impose a table level
>constraints on relationships within such a table, and depending on the
>platform, it can be difficult to really organize the data into major
>locations (country, say) and the component children. Oracle allows me
>to do this using the Connect by prior statements, for example. The real
>advantage of such a system as this is that I'm not locked into specific
>"geo-political" organizational structure.

Perhaps you mean that simply reorganizing a tree, interactively, is simpler than redesigning a fixed scheme of tables and links?

Connect By implies the use of one-way pointers/links, in an adjacency list. This violates the very basic concept of the relation of vaguely defined 'related things', which are unsorted/unordered.

Yet information is often sorted, and typically hierarchical. And information is often sparse in some areas, and the hierarchy flexible or not so well understood. Received on Tue Feb 21 2006 - 02:31:54 CET