The most common pattern is the "adjacency list" model[0]. Every entry has an ID and parent ID, at least. You can also include an "origin" ID for the root of the tree. For this, you need to build an entire thread with recursive queries (for each ID, get children of ID, etc.) HN and other Arc based forum use this.

Slightly more involved is the "nested set" model[1] which actually maintains a balanced tree. It's easier to query an entire tree than with the adjacency list, but insertions and deletions are more costly.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjacency_list

    I think the point of a high-level language is to make your programs shorter. All other things (e.g. libraries) being equal, language A is better than language B if programs are shorter in A. (As measured by the size of the parse tree, obviously, not lines or characters.) The goal of Bel is to be a good language. This can be measured in the length of programs written in it.

[0]https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bellanguage.txt...;

It isn't well documented and only tested on a SQL connection but it's just a set of wrappers around Racket's DB drivers, so you could try including that into your app.

Unfortunately I seem to have completely lost my test project but the connection should work as follows:

    (= dbconn (postgresql-connect user db password))

btw I caught a misspelled 'password' in postgresql-secure-connect:

  (mac postgresql-secure-connect (user db ssl-protocol (o passowrd nil))

  (= dbconn (postgresql-connect "root" "root" password))
  (table-exists? dbconn "items")

Also, hey everybody, there's a project tab for the forum on the repo. Feel free to add to it, or whatever.