I'm not sure I understand

Shaggy — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:40:18 +0000

I'm not sure I understand what you are asking?

If you are attempting to store companies, and their related users, I'd go with a simple parent/child relationship.

Consider:

create sequence seq_companies;
create table companies (
  company_id int not null primary key default nextval('seq_companies'),
  company_name
);

create sequence seq_company_users;
create table company_users (
  company_id int not null,
  user_id int not null primary key default nextval('seq_users'),
  user_name varchar(100),
  CONSTRAINT "company_to_users" FOREIGN KEY ("company_id") references companies ("company_id") ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE
);

Insert a company into the companies table.
Insert users into the company_users table. When inserting a user, insert their company_id as well.

This would only provide one level of 'heirarchy' however - there are companies, and then there are users. If you want to get a 'deeper' structure, you'll need to look at "Nested Sets", or consider storing your heirarchical data in a different type of store than RDBMS, such as LDAP.

Cheers,
Shaggy.