Lesson 1: Converting a Table to a Hierarchical Structure

Customers who have tables using self joins to express hierarchical relationships can convert their tables to a hierarchical structure using this lesson as a guide. It is relatively easy to migrate from this representation to one using hierarchyid. After migration, users will have a compact and easy to understand hierarchical representation, which can be indexed in several ways for efficient queries.

This lesson, examines an existing table, creates a new table containing a hierarchyid column, populates the table with the data from the source table, and then demonstrates three indexing strategies. This lesson contains the following topics:

• Examining the Current Structure of the Employee Table

• Populating a Table with Existing Hierarchical Data

• Optimizing the NewOrg Table

• Summary: Converting a Table to a Hierarchical Structure

Prerequisites

This lesson requires the AdventureWorks2012 sample database. For information about how to install the AdventureWorks2012  sample database, see Getting Started with SQL Server Samples and Sample Databases.

Next Task in Lesson

Examining the Current Structure of the Employee Table

Next Lesson

Lesson 2: Creating and Managing Data in a Hierarchical Table