Chapter 13. Tree-Structured Data

Tree-structured—hierarchical—data is all around us. In addition to a real tree you might have in your back yard or in the nearby park that has a trunk and branches, you may attend a basketball tournament where the bracket is a time-based version of a tree structure, with only one team ending up at the root at the end of the tournament. At your job, the management structure is, by nature, a tree structure with the boss or owner at the top, and a couple or many levels of management before reaching the hourly workers at the bottom of the tree.

Entire database management systems are built around hierarchical data. One of IBM Corporation's most popular products, Information Management System (IMS), arrived in the late ...

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