Hierarchies in SQL

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Hierarchies in SQL

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Jeff Moden

Posted Tuesday, January 18, 2011 6:56 PM

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From the article...

The speed difference and IO difference can be significant on the two. For example, I have a hierarchy in one of my databases with 2,700 nodes in it, going up to six levels deep. If someone at the top of that hierarchy signs in, it takes 11 seconds for my server to resolve the whole hierarchy and determine what data that person has access to (this is a security access hierarchy that controls much of what is displayed to customers on a web site). That’s using the adjacency model. Using a nested sets table, that same hierarchy takes less than 1 millisecond. (This isn’t the one with multiple parents. Different company.)

If this same database didn’t have a lot of updates to the hierarchies, I’d definitely use a straight-up nested sets hierarchy, and have much faster web pages. But it does have a lot of updates, sometimes several per minute, sometimes several at the same time. Each nested sets rebuild takes about 20-30 seconds to finish, and locks the table pretty aggressively while it’s running.

Hi Gus,

I've had reason to revisit this article and the paragraphs above caught my eye, especially the two emphasized areas.

With that in mind, which method are you using to convert the Adjacency List to a Nested Set Model? Is it the familiar "push stack" method from Joe Celko's book/article postings? And was it for the ~2700 rows you mentioned?

Thanks, Gus.

--Jeff Moden

"RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for "Row-By-Agonizing-Row".

First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
Stop thinking about what you want to do to a row... think, instead, of what you want to do to a column."

For better, quicker answers on T-SQL questions, click on the following...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/

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http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQLServerCentral/66909/

Post #1049761

GSquared

Posted Wednesday, January 19, 2011 6:37 AM

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I don't have access to that code currently, since it's for a prior employer. However, if I remember it correctly, it ended up using the TopParentID mentioned in the article to first find a simple count by that column, did a "running total" type calculation on that (I use a CLR function for that, blindingly fast) to get top level range start and stop values. All of that was very, very fast, like milliseconds. I think it then repeated that for each level till it got zero for @@rowcount, but the lower levels weren't as fast because they had to actually crawl the hierarchy to get the number of nodes beneath each, instead of just a count on TopParentID.

I tried the update method mentioned in Joe's article and found that it was WAY too slow for an in-use database. My update solution was more complex, but much, much faster.

I could improve the process immensely with the difference between what I know now and what I knew when I built it, but that's pretty much true of any code I wrote more than about a month ago. Just some simple Cross Apply inline queries would make the thing much more efficient.

The 2,700 rows was for one hierarchy within a multi-million row table. 11 seconds to resolve anything on a 2,700-row table would imply that I was running it on, maybe a 286 CPU with 2 Meg of RAM? TSR-80? Timex/Sinclair 1000? Not sure how far back I'd have to go to get that bad of performance, even on an adjacency crawl. If I remember correctly, the table had somewhere around 2-million total rows, and 2,700 nodes, 6 levels deep, was the biggest single hierarchy within it.

- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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Post #1050002

Jeff Moden

Posted Thursday, January 20, 2011 1:42 PM

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Thanks Gus.

--Jeff Moden

Post #1051158

amenjonathan

Posted Friday, January 28, 2011 1:23 PM

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Just wanted to post back to this thread that I finished my blog post on handling hierarchies in slowly changing dimensions. If I've misquoted anyone (especially Gus) please let me know. Also any feedback if someone knows of a better / faster way.

SCD with hierarchy in key

My SQL Server Blog

Post #1055590

GSquared

Posted Friday, January 28, 2011 8:58 PM

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amenjonathan (1/28/2011)

I read the post, and it looks like it makes sense and would work. Definitely well-written too.

- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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Post #1055701

amenjonathan

Posted Saturday, January 29, 2011 2:09 AM

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Thanks, Gus.

My SQL Server Blog

Post #1055737

Alan.B

Posted Wednesday, March 06, 2013 3:59 PM

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I know I am a little late here but, Great article Gus.

FYI - the to Celko's article (http://www.intelligententerprise.com/001020/celko.jhtml.) is broke Wink

-- AJB
xmlsqlninja.com

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