Can Vertica Climb a Tree?

The answer is YES if it is the right king of tree. Here “tree” refers to a common data structure that consists of parent-child hierarchical relationship such as an org chart. Traditionally this kind of hierarchical data structure can be modeled and stored in tables but is usually not simple to navigate and use in a relational database (RDBMS). Some other RDBMS (e.g.. Oracle) has a built-in CONNECT_BY function that can be used to find the level of a given node and navigate the tree. However if you take a close look at its syntax, you will realize that it is quite complicated and not at all easy to understand or use.