Patent ID: 7412444

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for efficiently indexing a hierarchical data structure stored in a database, the method comprising: creating an instance of a database in which elements of a hierarchical data structure are in an ancestor-descendant relationship and an element is indexed by a peer sequence value that identifies sequential ordering of elements having a same parent; transforming the peer sequence value for a parent element into a sorting construct of a given width to generate the sorting tree construct of the parent element, wherein the sorting tree construct maintains the sequential ordering of the elements having the same parent; transforming the peer sequence value of a child element into a sorting construct of the given width, wherein the sorting construct of the child element maintains the sequential ordering of the child elements having the same parent; and prepending the sorting tree construct of the parent element to the left of the transformed peer sequence value of the child element to generate a sorting tree construct of the child element, wherein the peer sequence values and the sorting constructs are ordered according to the same collating sequence.