Your Hierarchical Database Trickery is Weak and Pointless

While searching for some recursion help in MySQL, I ran across MySQL AB :: Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL. It's a lovely read, duplicated several times all over the net by people looking to cash in on the idea by changing the names of the object, but it's got one flaw: It's weak.

Yep, it's frail. It's so specialized that it can do naught but crouch in its little niche and do one thing well but nothing else at all. Let me crush your handy model with the image at right.

Now, tough guy, show me the might of this edge model over the adjacent model.

While you're at it, show me some REAL recursion instead of this "if you think your table is X deep, do X left-joins" crap. That's not recursion, and you should know that. Recursion runs into the deepest chasm or to the end of an array without knowing where it is, how far it's come nor how far it has left to do. Recursion is, by nature, completely short-sighted; that's the beauty of recursion.

Recursion doesn't give me a migraine at all; idiots who iterate and call it recursion, or who confine truly wonderful data by crappy meta-data, all to avoid recursion, make me hulk out and want to kill everything. How come a guy like me can grok recursion and you people can't?