5 ms·

Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with SQL? I think people just want to bitch... just like this... yah.

• olavk 19y ago
  Well, one drawback is that it is difficult to query tree-structured data.
  • spiralhead 19y ago
    My solution to that: store representations of trees as simple paths like "/trunk/branch/leaf1/", "/trunk/branch/leaf2/", etc. And just rely on the application layer to parse it all out into a friendly IU. When you want a specific branch, just do "select * from table where signature like '/trunk/branch/%'
    • imsteve 19y ago
      In my experience, that is obscenely slow.. Not practical whatsoever.
      • spiralhead 19y ago
        not if you cache your data structures intelligently... probably not a good solution for something like PHP or Rails where you lose your application state across requests Or do you mean that using "like" is slow? i would think that it would not be as long as that column is indexed.
  • palish 19y ago
    It depends on how fast you need to do it. In Rails it's as easy as person.apartment.landlord.house.city.state.country.continent.planet.name.
    • olavk 19y ago
      Perhaps I should have said querying recursive data structures. E.g. you can easily represent a family tree in a RDB, but it's not so easy to write a query to get all ancestors of a specific person.
      • sbraford 19y ago
        Good point. It's also not the end of the world in many cases to use 2 queries (or even more if each one is blazing fast). Just check your data first to make sure you don't have O(n) where n can actually be 5,10,20+.