Question about top record in parent-child hierarchy

Jerry S.

In the examples of parent-child tables I have been able to find, they use an org chart as an example.

It says in the table, the CEO record needs to have null in the parent and distance fields.

In the physical table, our CEO record points to itself in the parent field.

There is a zero in both the key and parent key fields for the CEO record.

My question is this: When the parent-child relationship table is created using the script,

does it create this CEO record with the null parent, or does it need to be that way

in the physical table before the parent-child relationship table is created?

Jerry S.

Update: Just in case anyone has this question in the future.

I did some experimentation and the CEO record needs to have a null value in its parent key field in the

original data table before the scripts are run to build and populate the parent-child relationship table.