Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Patrick Eugene O'Neil

Elizabeth Jean O'Neil

Istvan Cseri

Sameet Harishanker Agarwal

Shankar Pal

Jose A Blakeley

F Soner Terek

Gideon Schaller

Nigel Clifton Westbury

Jun Fang

Peter Alan Carlin

A technique for representing the structure of hierarchically-organized data in a non-hierarchical data structure, such as a relation. The hierarchically-organized data is represented as a tree, and each node in the tree is assigned a position identifier that represents both the depth level of the node within the hierarchy, and its ancestor/descendant relationship to other nodes. The data represented by each node, as well as its position identifier, is stored in a row of a relational database, thereby capturing the hierarchical structure of the data in such relational database. A technique is provided for the compressed storage of position identifiers in a format that allows an efficient bytewise comparison of position identifiers to determine relative order and ancestry.

System and method for relational representation of hierarchical data

Any string in any character set with an arbitrary-leveled weight-based comparison system is transformed into a bitstring in such a way that two transformed strings can be compared byte-by-byte. The resulting bit string has the minimum possible maximum length. The transformed bit strings can be inverted&#x2014;meaning the original string can be recovered from the transformed string.

Compressed normalized character comparison with inversion

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Cambridge, MS, United States of America

Patrick Eugene O'Neil