Thanks for your answers guys. I've got a cold right now and my brain is mush, so I can't comment intelligently on your suggestions just yet. I just wanted to express my thanks for your time. Jeff, one book you might want to look at is Joe Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties. http://www.amazon.com/Hierarchies-Smarties-Kaufmann-Management-Systems/dp/1558609202 If the connectby() function is like the Oracle connectby function, then perhaps it will suit my needs. The categorization scheme will nearly always have multiple parents for all but the topmost node. Each category stores serialized method calls for CRUD operations on objects within the category, which are requested by the application for all interactions with stored objects (though I'd like to be able to cache them too, but that's in the application domain). Each object stored in the database will belong to at least one category, but I expect they will normally belong to many categories. When I create a new object of categoryD, which is a child of categoryC and categoryB, which are children of categoryA, then my application will need the CREATE method calls from all parents, as well as the object category itself. I'd like them all returned from one query, possibly ordered according to the distance from the child node. Oops, I'm trying to comment intelligently. Better stop now. Cheers, Paul ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
