design multilevel marketing database

I am designing a database for a multilevel marketing company. The database will store hiearchical data in child-parent relationships, so that a tree data structure is formed. I specifically need to be able to quickly determine the entire "upline" or "downline" or for a given person. An upline includes all the parent entities, grandparent entities, and great grandparent entities etc., for a given person. I need your help designing the the best and fastest database structure to do this. Specific instructions on how to design the database, or links to websites that describe how to build this design would be useful. I have already built a basic "relational" database structure that contains the parent child relationship like this, but I need something better: parent child 1 2 2 3 2 4 4 5 But in order to find all the parents of 5, you have to recursively loop through the database. This is slow. I need a database structure that would more quickly enable me to find all the parents of 5. (in this example it would be 4,2,1). thanks for bidding! ## Deliverables Specific instructions on how to design the database, or links to websites that describe how to build this design. ## Platform doesn't really matter. I can adapt the design to my specific database.