Here is another article on multipath nonlinear hierarchical transformation. My previous article on Any-to-ANY Structure Transformations was announced here a couple of months ago. It was actually the first part of a larger article. The previous article described Reshaping and this current follow up article describes Restructuring. These terms are usually used interchangeably but these articles also make a case for more accurately identifying different types of structure transformations. Reshaping uses the hierarchical structure semantics to reshape the structure in any way while preserving the data and its semantics as much as possible. While Restructuring uses the natural data relationships in the data structure to create a new structure with new semantics. These transformation types usually have different uses.

What makes the following transformation article interesting is that SQL is performing the restructuring transformation while it is operating hierarchically. This makes it easier for the user to specify the transformation because SQL is performing the hierarchical operations automatically. This makes sure the result is hierarchically correct based on the hierarchical input structures involved and the new data modeling applied.

Performing Hierarchical Restructuring Using ANSI SQL: 

http://www.devx.com/xml/Article/41464/1954?pf=true

Regards,

 /Mike

Michael M David
Advanced Data Access Technologies, Inc.
www.adatinc.com