Given a group of people - in which some people are subordinate to
others - how can I best store that information and then retrieve it
so that the relationship information is clear and so that
relationships can be easily changed (i.e. one person is promoted).
Simplicity tells me that ALL of the people should be stored in the
same table, and that their relationships should be defined by a field
or fields within the database.
So if we have:
Jane Smith
|
|
John Doe ________ Linda Brown
|
|
Bill Smith ______ James Smith
(1) How can I best set up a database to indicate the relationships
so that they can be extracted easily with DBI?
(2) In perl/DBI, what's the simplest approach to outputting this
data in the form of a report, so that:
Jane Smith
Linda Brown
Bill Smith
James Smith
John Doe
etc....
I have a couple of projects in which this sort of data storage could
be useful - some involving people and companies, and some involving
hierarchies of categories, like:
Animals
Reptiles
Snakes
Lizards
Mammals
Dogs
Cats
..etc...
And if it makes a difference, I'm using MySQL.
Thank you,
Nelson Goforth
