Which Hierarchical model should I use? Adjacency, Nested, or Enumerated?

Question

I have a table which contains a location of all geographical locations in the world and their relationships.

Here is a example that shows the hierarchy. You will see tha

Answer 1

This is the query that I came up. It is an adaption of what you suggestion Quassnoi.

SELECT   pa.*,  level, SUBSTRING_INDEX(p.ancestry, '/', l.level),  p.*
FROM     geoplanet_places p
JOIN     levels l
ON       SUBSTRING_INDEX(p.ancestry, '/', l.level) <> p.ancestry 
JOIN     geoplanet_places  pa
ON       pa.woeid =  SUBSTRING_INDEX( SUBSTRING_INDEX(p.ancestry, '/', l.level),'/',-1)
WHERE    p.woeid = "13911"

This returns all of the parents of Brighton.

The problem with your query was that it wasn't return the path to parents, but instead any node which shared the same path.

SELECT     pa.*, GROUP_CONCAT(pa.name ORDER BY pa.lft asc),group_concat( pa.lft  ), pa.ancestry
                                            FROM     geo_places p
                                            JOIN     levels l
                                            ON       SUBSTRING_INDEX(CONCAT(p.ancestry, p.woeid,'/'), '/', l.level) <> p.ancestry 
                                            JOIN     geo_places  pa
                                            ON       pa.woeid =  SUBSTRING_INDEX( SUBSTRING_INDEX(CONCAT(p.ancestry, p.woeid,'/'), '/', l.level),'/',-1)
                                            WHERE    p.woeid IN ("12767488","12832668","12844837","131390","131391","12846428","24534461")
                                            GROUP BY p.woeid