Re: Traversing a Category tree, is there an easy way to do this? Need an experts opinion!!!!!

[Erin ONeill]

I'm in the process of helping one of my programmers create better tables. Now that the redundant index lecture is over, as well as the PLEASE use date datatypes he pulls out this code (not documented) and I find out it's based on Celko's modified preorder traversal tree. This sends my mind back to C, datastructures and n-ary trees which I learned oh so long ago.

My concerns (besides the tables looking rather cryptic) is that this seems like a great technique for information that isn't updated/inserted very often. That is NOT the case here. So neither the adjacency tree or the nested set tree seems like a good solution? Or am I just being paranoid? should I just work on field names (making them more clear) and indexes? I've finally got my Server key writes down, my slow_query_log down (and those all belong to the 3rd party bulletin board we have).

Any suggestions on things to look at? I've read all the celko articles as well as this article:
http://www.vbmysql.com/articles/managing-hierarchical-data-in-mysql.html

Any thoughts on how to speed up writes to a nested set? or should I abandon that in favor of something else?

Using MySQL 4.0.20 so no triggers/procedures. All work will be done in MySQL and php ...

thanks,
erin