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Joe Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties
book

Joe Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties

by Joe Celko
June 2004
Intermediate to advanced
240 pages
4h 39m
English
Morgan Kaufmann
Content preview from Joe Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties

CHAPTER 2 Adjacency List Model

IN THE EARLY days of System R at IBM one of the arguments against a relational database was that SQL could not handle hierarchies the way IMS could (see Chapter 12), and would therefore not be practical for large databases. It might have a future as an ad hoc query language, but that was the best that could be expected of it.

In a short paper Dr. E. F. Codd described a method for showing hierarchies in SQL that consisted of a column for the boss and another column for the employee in the relationship. It was a direct implementation in a table of the Adjacency List Model of a graph. Oracle was the first commercial database to use SQL, and the sample database that comes with their product, nicknamed the “Scott/Tiger” ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781558609204