In my last post, I showed you how to install and enable a Postgres extension called LTREE. LTREE allows me to save, query on and manipulate trees or hierarchical data structures using a relational database table. As we’ll see, using LTREE I can count leaves, cut off branches, and climb up and down trees easily – all using SQL right inside my application’s existing Postgres database!
But trees are natural, haphazard, branching structures with countless leaves, while database tables are man-made rectangles full of numbers and text. How can I possibly save a beautiful tree structure into an ugly, boring database table?
Path Enumeration
Let’s return to the example tree from the first post in this series:
The LTREE extension uses the path enumeration algorithm, which calls for each node in the tree to record the path from the root you would have to follow to reach that node.
