How does hierarchyid data type work?

Question

I would like to make a CLR user-defined type in SQL Server 2005 that has the same performance benefits as hierarchyid to model hierarchies.

Does anyone have any ideas/pointers?

Answer 1

I found it - how hierarchyId is implemented. It's a slick bit-twiddling algorithm called ORDPATH.

http://www.cs.umb.edu/~poneil/ordpath.pdf

(via: http://sqlkpi.com/BLOGS/BOBB/post/ORDPATH-ORDPATH-everywhere.aspx)

This could be an interesting side-project.