I posted this on reddit some days ago, but haven’t received any response.

Everything I’ve read online about the pandas MultiIndex makes it seem like a counterpart to a SQL composite index. Is this the correct understanding?

Additionally, MultiIndex is often described as hierarchical. This disrupts the analogy with a composite index. To me, that means a tree structure, with parent keys and child keys, possibly with a depth greater than 2. A composite index doesn’t fit this picture. In the case of MultiIndexes, what are the parent/child keys?