March 2009
Intermediate to advanced
832 pages
23h 49m
English
This chapter covers treatment of specialized data structures called graphs, trees, and hierarchies in Microsoft SQL Server using T-SQL. Of the three, probably the most commonly used among T-SQL programmers is the hierarchy, and this term is sometimes used even when the data structure involved is not really a hierarchy. I’ll start with a terminology section describing each data structure to clear the confusion.
Treatment (representation, maintenance, and manipulation) of graphs, trees, and hierarchies in an RDBMS is far from trivial. I’ll discuss two main approaches, one based on iterative/recursive logic and another based on materializing extra information in the database that describes ...