"""Illustrates the "materialized paths" pattern. Materialized paths is a way to represent a tree structure in SQL with fast descendant and ancestor queries at the expense of moving nodes (which require O(n) UPDATEs in the worst case, where n is the number of nodes in the tree). It is a good balance in terms of performance and simplicity between the nested sets model and the adjacency list model. It works by storing all nodes in a table with a path column, containing a string of delimited IDs. Think file system paths: 1 1.2 1.3 1.3.4 1.3.5 1.3.6 1.7 1.7.8 1.7.9 1.7.9.10 1.7.11 Descendant queries are simple left-anchored LIKE queries, and ancestors are already stored in the path itself. Updates require going through all descendants and changing the prefix. """ from sqlalchemy import Column, Integer, String, func, select, create_engine from sqlalchemy.orm import remote, foreign, relationship, Session from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base from sqlalchemy.sql.expression import cast from sqlalchemy.dialects.postgresql import ARRAY Base = declarative_base() class Node(Base): __tablename__ = "node" id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True, autoincrement=False) path = Column(String(500), nullable=False, index=True) # To find the descendants of this node, we look for nodes whose path # starts with this node's path. descendants = relationship( "Node", viewonly=True, order_by=path, primaryjoin=remote(foreign(path)).like(path.concat(".%"))) # Finding the ancestors is a little bit trickier. We need to create a fake # secondary table since this behaves like a many-to-many join. secondary = select([ id.label("id"), func.unnest(cast(func.string_to_array( func.regexp_replace(path, r"\.?\d+$", ""), "."), ARRAY(Integer))).label("ancestor_id") ]).alias() ancestors = relationship("Node", viewonly=True, secondary=secondary, primaryjoin=id == secondary.c.id, secondaryjoin=secondary.c.ancestor_id == id, order_by=path) @property def depth(self): return len(self.path.split(".")) - 1 def __repr__(self): return "Node(id={})".format(self.id) def __str__(self): root_depth = self.depth s = [str(self.id)] s.extend(((n.depth - root_depth) * " " + str(n.id)) for n in self.descendants) return "\n".join(s) def move_to(self, new_parent): new_path = new_parent.path + "." + str(self.id) for n in self.descendants: n.path = new_path + n.path[len(self.path):] self.path = new_path if __name__ == "__main__": engine = create_engine("postgresql://scott:tiger@localhost/test", echo=True) Base.metadata.create_all(engine) session = Session(engine) print("-" * 80) print("create a tree") session.add_all([ Node(id=1, path="1"), Node(id=2, path="1.2"), Node(id=3, path="1.3"), Node(id=4, path="1.3.4"), Node(id=5, path="1.3.5"), Node(id=6, path="1.3.6"), Node(id=7, path="1.7"), Node(id=8, path="1.7.8"), Node(id=9, path="1.7.9"), Node(id=10, path="1.7.9.10"), Node(id=11, path="1.7.11"), ]) session.flush() print(str(session.query(Node).get(1))) print("-" * 80) print("move 7 under 3") session.query(Node).get(7).move_to(session.query(Node).get(3)) session.flush() print(str(session.query(Node).get(1))) print("-" * 80) print("move 3 under 2") session.query(Node).get(3).move_to(session.query(Node).get(2)) session.flush() print(str(session.query(Node).get(1))) print("-" * 80) print("find the ancestors of 10") print([n.id for n in session.query(Node).get(10).ancestors]) session.close() Base.metadata.drop_all(engine)