Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL

February 17 2010, 2:54pm

"Most users at one time or another have dealt with hierarchical data in a SQL database and no doubt learned that the management of hierarchical data is not what a relational database is intended for. The tables of a relational database are not hierarchical (like XML), but are simply a flat list. Hierarchical data has a parent-child relationship that is not naturally represented in a relational database table. In this article we will examine two models for dealing with hierarchical data in MySQL"