SQL Antipatterns

How to Recognize the Antipattern

If you hear a question like the following, it’s a clue that the Naive Trees antipattern is being employed:

• “How many levels do we need to support in trees?”

  You’re struggling to get all descendants or all ancestors of a node, without using a recursive query. You could compromise by supporting only trees of a limited depth, but the next natural question is, how deep is deep enough?

• “I dread having to touch the code that manages the tree data structures.”

  You’ve adopted one of the more sophisticated solutions of managing hierarchies, but you’re using the wrong one. Each technique makes some tasks easier, but usually at the cost of other tasks that become harder. You may have chosen a solution that isn’t ...