Reusable Prime Number Labeling Scheme for Hierarchical Data Representation in Relational Databases

Abstract

Hierarchical data structures are important for many computing and information science disciplines including data mining, terrain modeling, and image analysis. There are many specialized hierarchical data management systems, but they are not always available. Alternatively, relational databases are far more common and offer superior reliability, scalability, and performance. However, relational databases cannot natively store and manage hierarchical data. Labeling schemes resolve this issue by labeling all nodes with alphanumeric strings that can be safely stored and retrieved from a database. One such scheme uses prime numbers for its labeling purposes, however the performance and space utilization of this method are not optimal. We propose a more efficient and compact version of this approach.

Efficiently Answering Reachability Queries for Tree-Structured Data in Repetitive Prime Number Labeling Schemes

“…Experiments were conducted to compare our approach (REP+) with PRM [6], REP [8], and CRT [10]. Note that REP+ and REP employ the same labeling schema, called REP, but different reachability test methods.…”

“…In [8,9], a repetitive prime number labeling scheme (hereafter, REP) was described that reuses prime numbers inherited from parents. In [10], the order of ancestors' self labels is encoded based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem (hereafter, CRT). A drawback of these approaches is that their inefficient method for performing reachability tests significantly reduces their usability in the case of large datasets.…”