Improving scalability of the modified preorder tree traversal algorithm

Question

I\'ve been thinking about the modified preorder tree traversal algorithm for storing trees within a flat table (such as SQL).

One property I dislike about the standard a

Answer 1

I think you're better off looking at a different way of storing trees. If your tree is broad but not terribly deep (which seems likely for the case you suggested), you can store the complete list of ancestors up to the root against each node. That way, modifying a node doesn't require touching any nodes other than the node being modified.