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Knowing more than one approach for dealing with hierarchies in relational dbs is a good idea. I've used both nested sets and proprietary approaches (things lik

• rjurney 17y ago
  I agree. I implemented a pre-calculated nested tree, as in the article, based on an existing PHP implementation but in Perl. In benchmarking it, I found that it was faster than I thought to update the entire, large tree - but that the L-Tree was going to be a much better solution overall. L-Tree has that low-level C, Russian hacker edge going for it :) But your mileage may vary. The nice thing about the pre-calc stuff is that it is very approachable, and you can build it yourself. I found doing so very educational and encourage anyone who is curious to play around. As someone else mentioned - we also looked at rolling our own materialized path trees - and did an implementation of this as well, but in the end L-Tree 'just works' out of the box, and is wicked fast compared to a higher level implementation... so we went with it. Its great. I'm not a Postgres fanatic or anything - I like MySQL and Postgres, and lots of NoSQL databases too, but Postgres is great at this in particular.