I have a tree structure in a table and it uses materialized paths to allow me to find children quickly. However, I also need to sort the results depth-first, as one would expect with threaded forum replies.
id | parent_id | matpath | created
----+-----------+---------+----------------------------
2 | 1 | 1 | 2010-05-08 15:18:37.987544
3 | 1 | 1 | 2010-05-08 17:38:14.125377
4 | 1 | 1 | 2010-05-08 17:38:57.26743
5 | 1 | 1 | 2010-05-08 17:43:28.211708
7 | 1 | 1 | 2010-05-08 18:18:11.849735
6 | 2 | 1.2 | 2010-05-08 17:50:43.288759
9 | 5 | 1.5 | 2010-05-09 14:02:43.818646
8 | 6 | 1.2.6 | 2010-05-09 14:01:17.632695
So the final results should actually be sorted like this:
id | parent_id | matpath | created
----+-----------+---------+----------------------------
2 | 1 | 1 | 2010-05-08 15:18:37.987544
6 | 2 | 1.2 | 2010-05-08 17:50:43.288759
8 | 6 | 1.2.6 | 2010-05-09 14:01:17.632695
3 | 1 | 1 | 2010-05-08 17:38:14.125377
4 | 1 | 1 | 2010-05-08 17:38:57.26743
5 | 1 | 1 | 2010-05-08 17:43:28.211708
9 | 5 | 1.5 | 2010-05-09 14:02:43.818646
7 | 1 | 1 | 2010-05-08 18:18:11.849735
How would I work that out? Can I do that in straight SQL (this is PostgreSQL 8.4) or should additional information be added to this table?
Update: trying to explain sort criteria better.
Imagine that id '1' is the root post to a forum and everything with a 'matpath' beginning with '1' is a child of that post. So ids 2 through 5 are direct replies to 1 and get matpaths of '1'. However, id 6 is a reply 2, not directly to 1, so it gets a matpath of 1.2. This means that for a threaded forum with proper nesting, with all ids shown in the tables, the structure of the forum would look like this, hence the ordering requirement:
* id 1 (root post)
* id 2
* id 6
* id 8
* id 3
* id 4
* id 5
* id 9
* id 7