title: How to structure data... Sequential or Hierarchical?
body: <p>I'm going through the exercise of building a CMS that will organize a lot of the common documents that my employer generates each time we get a new sales order.  Each new sales order gets a 5 digit number (12222,12223,122224, etc...) but internally we have applied a hierarchy to these numbers:</p>
  
  <pre><code>+ 121XX
  |--01
  |--02
  + 122XX
  |--22
  |--23
  |--24
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In my table for sales orders, is it better to use the 5 digital number as an ID and populate up or would it be better to use the hierarchical structure that we use when referring to jobs in regular conversation?  The only benefit to not populating sequentially seems to be formatting the data later on in my view, but that doesn't sound like a good enough reason to go through the extra work.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>