ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Nested set collection

Okay kiddo, let me explain nested set collection in a way that you can easily understand. Imagine you have a bunch of nested boxes, one inside the other. Each box is either completely inside another box or is completely outside of it. Nested set collection is just like these boxes, but with data.

The nested set collection is a way of organizing data in a tree-like structure. Each item in the tree is called a node, and each node can have zero or more children. A node can also have a parent, except for the one at the root of the tree, which has no parent.

Now, every node in the tree is represented by two numbers – a left number and a right number. These numbers are like little name tags that tell you where in the tree that node belongs. Just like how you can tell which box is inside which by looking at where their edges meet.

So, if you have a node with a left number of 3 and a right number of 8, that means it has five children (four between 4 and 7) and no parent. And if another node has a left number of 5 and a right number of 6, it's a child of the first node.

The nested set collection is a really clever way of organizing data, because you can easily find all the descendants of any node just by looking at their left and right numbers. And it's really efficient for working with trees, because you don't need to do any recursive queries – you can just look at the range of numbers.

So, nested set collection is like a bunch of nested boxes that contain data, organized in a tree-like structure with each node represented by a left and right number. It's a really smart way of organizing data in a tree!