Company
Date Published
Author
Daniel Coupal, Ken W. Alger
Word count
636
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The Tree Pattern is a schema design pattern used to represent hierarchical data in MongoDB, aiming to reduce JOIN operations by storing related data together. This approach involves representing the hierarchy as an array of "parents" for each node, which can be stored in a single field, allowing for efficient querying and updates. The pattern is particularly useful for scenarios with static or rarely changing hierarchies, such as product catalogs, where it enables fast retrieval of descendants and ancestors. While there may be a tradeoff between simplicity and performance, the Tree Pattern offers better performance by avoiding multiple JOINs, but requires careful management of updates to the graph.