SQL being notoriously poor at hierarchal data has been known for quite a while; he's obviously very correct there. While SQL's difficulty with handling hierarc

SQL being notoriously poor at hierarchal data has been known for quite a while; he's obviously very correct there. While SQL's difficulty with handling hierarchical data is well-known, he asserts that it is somehow a fundamental problem with relational databases, which I think vastly overstates the magnitude of the problem. Oracle goes so far as to offer a non-standard CONNECT statement for tree traversal. Standard SQL added support for recursive queries via WITH RECURSIVE more than 10 years ago, and most modern databases support it; Oracle is just anachronistic here.