The Materialized Path Technique: Tree Structures for Relational Database Systems

Editor’s Note: The following is an article written for and published in DZone’s 2021 Data Persistence Trend Report.


Conventional database systems such as MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server are based upon tables, implying rows and columns. This makes it difficult to represent relational graph objects, with records being parents and children of other records in the same table. In fact, this is one of the primary arguments for why developers are choosing NoSQL today, because it makes it so simple to represent graph objects.