The invention addresses the problem of storing and maintaining highly hierarchical information in a relational database, relational databases which are more prevalent and enjoy strong database provider support. The efficacy of the storage and the maintenance of highly hierarchical information a relational database is aided by a record key uniquely ascribed to each database record across all database record tables in the relational database. Further the record key has a format which permits the specification of a "contains" relationship between database records. Beneficial information storage and information retrieval improvements are attained by using this, and only this, record key to index all database records in all record tables in the relational database.