Materialized Path is a method for representing hierarchy in SQL. Each node contains the path itself and all its ancestors (grandparent/parent/self).
The django-treebeard implementation of MP (docs):
Each step of the path is a fixed length for consistent performance.
Each node contains depth and numchild fields (fast reads at minimal cost to writes).
The path field is indexed (with a standard b-tree index):
The materialized path approach makes heavy use of LIKE in your database, with …