How to represent a tree structure in NoSQL

Posted by Vlad Nicula on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Vlad Nicula
Published on 2014-05-24T10:00:35Z Indexed on 2014/05/26 22:00 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 380

Filed under:

database-design

|

node.js

|

nosql

|

mongodb

I'm new to NoSQL and have been playing around with a personal project on the MEAN stack (Mongo ExpressJs AngularJs NodeJs). I'm building a document editor of sorts that manages nodes of data. Each document is actually a tree.

I have a CRUD api for documents, to create new trees and a CRUD api for nodes in a given document.

Right now the documents are represented as a collection that holds everything, including nodes. The children parent relationship is done by ids. So the nodes are an map by id, and each node has references to what nodes are their children. I chose this "flat" approach because it is easier to get a node by id from a document.

Being used to having a relation table between nodes and documents, a relation table between nodes and children nodes I find it a bit weird that I have to save the entire "nodes" map each time I update a node.

Is there a better way to represent such a data type in NoSQL?

© Programmers or respective owner

Related posts about database-design

(Database Design - products attributes): What is better option for product attribute database design

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi, I new in database design. What is better option for product attribute database design for cms?(Please suggest other options also). option 1: 1 table products{ id product_name color price attribute_name1 attribute_value1 attribute_name2 attribute_value2 attribute_name3 attribute_value3 } option… >>> More
Book Review: Pro SQL Server 2008 Relational Database Design and Implementation

as seen on SQL Blog - Search for 'SQL Blog'
Investing in proper database design is a very efficient way to cut maintenance costs. If we expect a system to last, we need to make sure it has a good solid foundation - high quality database design. Surely we can and sometimes do cut corners and save on database design to get things done faster… >>> More
Advice on database design / SQL for retrieving data with chronological order

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I am creating a database that will help keep track of which employees have been on a certain training course. I would like to get some guidance on the best way to design the database. Specifically, each employee must attend the training course each year and my database needs to keep a history of… >>> More
Fiscal year handling strategies in database design

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
By fiscal year I mean all the data in the database (in all tables) that occurred in the particular year. Lets say that we are building an application that allows user to choose from different years. What way of implementing this would you prefer, and why: Separate fiscal year data based on multiple… >>> More
Database design for summarized data

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have a new table I'm going to add to a bunch of other summarized data, basically to take some of the load off by calculating weekly avgs. My question is whether I would be better off with one model over the other. One model with days of the week as a column with an additional column for price… >>> More

Related posts about node.js

Node.js Adventure - Node.js on Windows

as seen on Geeks with Blogs - Search for 'Geeks with Blogs'
Two weeks ago I had had a talk with Wang Tao, a C# MVP in China who is currently running his startup company and product named worktile. He asked me to figure out a synchronization solution which helps his product in the future. And he preferred me implementing the service in Node.js, since his worktile… >>> More
Node.js Adventure - Host Node.js on Windows Azure Worker Role

as seen on Geeks with Blogs - Search for 'Geeks with Blogs'
In my previous post I demonstrated about how to develop and deploy a Node.js application on Windows Azure Web Site (a.k.a. WAWS). WAWS is a new feature in Windows Azure platform. Since it’s low-cost, and it provides IIS and IISNode components so that we can host our Node.js application though Git… >>> More
Sending data through POST request from a node.js server to a node.js server

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I'm trying to send data through a POST request from a node.js server to another node.js server. What I do in the "client" node.js is the following: var options = { host: 'my.url', port: 80, path: '/login', method: 'POST' }; var req = http.request(options, function(res){ console… >>> More
node.js on multi-core machines

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
node.js looks interesting BUT... I must miss something - isn't node.js tuned only to run on a single process & thread? Then how does it scale for multi-core CPUs and multi-CPU servers? After all, it is all great to make fast as possible single-thread server, but for high loads I would want to… >>> More
Node.js as a custom (streaming) upload handler for Django

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I want to build an upload-centric app using Django. One way to do this is with nginx's upload module (nonblocking) but it has its problems. Node.js is supposed to be a good candidate for this type of application. But how can I make node.js act as an upload_handler() for Django (http://docs.djangoproject… >>> More