To clarify, Let us say I have users and userstats in my database and I also have information like city, state, county, and region associated with these two tables. In this scenario I can effectively roll up my userstats to city, state, county and region levels easily by a overnight or incremental process.
The alternate scenario where I don’t have fixed groups like city, state, county but I want certain super users to have the flexibility to create their own groups and tie the users manually in the following form:
User1| User2| - group1 User3| -> group3 User4| User5| - group2 User6| Additionally, I can still continue to have my city, state, county groups like this:
User1| User4| - city1 User3| -> county1 User4| User5| - city2 Is there a known database pattern that can be used to effectively roll up the associated data into these various buckets? Some kind of tagging pattern?
Please let me know If I am not being clear, I can more details to clarify.
Further clarification:
I want to track down a report for user clicks by country, and I can further drilldown 2 levels into state, and city.
Now let us say I have a facility to create my own groupings (via User interface) and now I will be able to create new regions that have cities from different states. So now my report can show me user clicks by country, then I can drill down into custom regions (group of cities). All the analytics like user clicks, various avgs should now be recalculated based on the new groups.
Take a look at nested sets or adjacency lists (also in the same article). They have their pluses and minuses….