Menu Representation In a Database

Hi Guys,
I'm new to the forum, my name's David.
I'm trying to redesign a menu for a WebApp.
Currently I have a structure with menucodes such as this 12-13-01-05 and then we parse this to figure out where is each menuitem located.
Now this imposes a problem for creating an automatic menu creation interface.
So now I want to put the menu in a database but I'm not sure as to how to do this in order to be able to do insertions and deletions efficiently.
After some research I figured that the only way to do this is to somehow store an ordered (or tree-like - both will work) structure into a database.
This is a challenge as the DB doesn't hold the order of the elements and if I order them up with an ID then after deletion and insertion I might have to rewrite all the IDs which is no good for the web app.
So what I'm looking for is any suggestion on how to store a menu into a database?
maybe some links if you know any?

Thanks,

David

Without knowing something about your webapp it's difficult to recommend a solution, but from what you said I think you could consider the following:

- a menu structure usually is read much more often than modified. So reading the menu tree should be very fast, while inserting or removing items may not need to be.

- if the menu structure is the same for all users of the webapp ldap might be a good solution because it't optimised for storing and fast retrieving of tree-like structurs


- if the menu structure is individually created per user, I would translate it to XML and store the XML text together with the user data in a database. Storing and retrieving a menu structure to and from XML should be an easy task.