Re: Dynamic SELECT condition

* Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> [02.03.2003 16:22]:
> Achilleus Mantzios <achill@matrix.gatewaynet.com> writes:
>
> You might want to look into the "Nested Sets" cookbook page too:
>
> http://www.brasileiro.net:8080/postgres/cookbook/view-recipes.adp?section_id=310&format=long
>
> This representation of hierarchies has a lot of nice properties including
> being able to look up a whole subtree quickly. It makes it a bit of a pain to
> modify the tree though.
>
> > If you want to know the direct kids (4,5 in the example) of id=3, then it is
> > select from table where itoar(3) ~ parents and level(parents)=2 (itoar and
> > level are simple C functions that convert an int4 to its corresponding 1x1
> > array and calculate the length of the array , respectively)
>
> In the "int_agg" directory in contrib there are operators that do this, you
> can say "WHERE parents *= 3". I prefer to keep level in a separate column
> though.
>
> I've find the features in the "int_agg" and "array" directories in the contrib
> directory to be extremely useful. The only disadvantage is that the optimizer
> doesn't have good basis for guessing the selectivity of the *= type operators.
>
> GiST indexing of arrays is nice but depends on knowing which element of the
> array you're looking for. If you're looking for 3 anywhere in the hierarchy I
> don't think you can use the index.

Thanks a lot.
Nested sets are pretty good.

In my app trees arebeing updated quite often, so, instead of having a field
field in a tree tale, I've combined nested sets with adjacency list. Now I
have such table:
tree_id        int4    not null,branch_id    int4    not null,leaf_id        int4    not null,left        int4    not
null,right       int4    not null,... 

Quite usefull, I think.

--

Victor Yegorov