If you're storing a tree in an RDBMS, please look into the closure table algorithm rather than adjacency, nested set, or materialized paths. If you're using Ra

If you're storing a tree in an RDBMS, please look into the closure table algorithm rather than adjacency, nested set, or materialized paths. If you're using Rails (3.2 through 4.1), try this: http://mceachen.github.io/closure_tree/ http://mceachen.github.io/closure_tree/ Like it says in the README: * Fetch your whole ancestor lineage in 1 SELECT. * Grab all your descendants in 1 SELECT. * Get all your siblings in 1 SELECT. * Fetch all descendants as a nested hash in 1 SELECT. * Find a node by ancestry path in 1 SELECT. * 2 SQL INSERTs on node creation * 3 SQL INSERT/UPDATEs on node reparenting None of the other approaches above have even remotely similar performance characteristics. If your tree is small (tens of nodes), you won't care. If it's bigger, you will.