Applying Transitive Closure to Sort Products Into Categories, Considering Nesting and Overlaps

Update: 2025-09-15

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This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/applying-transitive-closure-to-sort-products-into-categories-considering-nesting-and-overlaps.

A guide to efficiently managing nested categories and overlapping products, ensuring fast retrieval without duplicates in e-commerce systems.

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Handling product categorization in e-commerce can be quite the task, especially when nested categories and overlapping products make efficient retrieval without duplicates a real challenge. The method I found has a major impact on performance: setting up proper data storage, separating data for reading and modification, using relational and NoSQL databases, and applying graph theory to handle complex category nesting. The step-by-step guide shows how to sort out efficient data storage, use transitive closure for advanced indexing, build a service to maintain and update the graph, and take advantage of database indexing to avoid unnecessary sorting in RAM.