Building Generational Hierarchy Path by "Carry-Along Sort"

Concept hierarchies are important for generalization across database/data mining applications. Hierarchy generation has witnessed a booming interest with the exponential growth of information and the ever increasing needs for organizations. The underlying hierarchical structure identifies the relationships of dependence between different data categories and provides valuable sources of information for data categorization. We propose a new algorithm called ldquocarry-along sortrdquo to build a generational hierarchy (materialized) path dynamically from the outline number columns. It could be considered as a ldquomix-inrdquo between adjacency and materialized path.ldquoCarry-along sortrdquo is the "tricky" method and this method can be efficient from performance standpoint and avoiding complicated string operations as well. This algorithm will be avoiding performing complicated string operations which are actually being performed in static materialized path that are typically slow and cumbersome to write. The implementation of this new algorithm was done in Oracle and the complete algorithm was tested.