I’m designing a website which will revolve around a database tree much like one discussed in this node. I will be using one table to track categories using nodeID, parentID, and Category fields.
For example:
nodeID  parentNodeID  Description
------  ------------  -----------
1       1             persons
2       1             kids
3       1             grown_ups
4       4             books
5       4             manuals
6       4             dictionaries

Another table will be for items within certain categories. I’m running into design issues when planning how cascading deletes will work. My thinking is a recursive function which takes as input a list of node IDs. It runs a db call to get all of the children of each of the nodes. If the nodes have no children, they are deleted. Otherwise, the function is called on the childrens’ node IDs. I’m a little worrisome of the time such a function would require to run. I realize that this isn’t a database design forum, but if anyone has ideas, I’m all ears. Also, if you know of any good resources for this sort of information, I’d love references. Thanks

In reply to Cascade deletion by lpoht

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