How To Traverse a Tree/Work With Hierarchical data in SQL Code - sql

Question

Say I have an employee table, with a record for each employee in my company, and a column for supervisor (as seen below). I would like to prepare a report, which lists the names and title for each step in a supervision line. eg for dick robbins, 1d #15, i'd like a list of each supervisor in his "chain of command," all the way to the president, big cheese. I'd like to avoid using cursors, but if that's the only way to do this then that's ok.
id fname lname title supervisorid
1 big cheese president 1
2 jim william vice president 1
3 sally carr vice president 1
4 ryan allan senior manager 2
5 mike miller manager 4
6 bill bryan manager 4
7 cathy maddy foreman 5
8 sean johnson senior mechanic 7
9 andrew koll senior mechanic 7
10 sarah ryans mechanic 8
11 dana bond mechanic 9
12 chris mcall technician 10
13 hannah ryans technician 10
14 matthew miller technician 11
15 dick robbins technician 11
The real data probably won't be more than 10 levels deep...but I'd rather not just do 10 outside joins...I was hoping there was something better than that, and less involved than cursors.
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

This is basically a port of the accepted answer on my question that I linked to in the OP comments.
you can use common-table expressions
WITH Family As
(
SELECT e.id, e.supervisorid, 0 as Depth
FROM Employee e
WHERE id = #SupervisorID
UNION All
SELECT e2.ID, e2.supervisorid, Depth + 1
FROM Employee e2
JOIN Family
On Family.id = e2.supervisorid
)
SELECT*
FROM Family
For more:
Recursive Queries Using Common Table Expressions

Answer 2

You might be interested in the "Materialized Path" solution, which does slightly de-normalize the table but can be used on any type of SQL database and prevents you from having to do recursive queries. In fact, it can even be used on no-SQL databases.
You just need to add a column which holds the entire ancestry of the object. For example, the table below includes a column named tree_path:
+----+-----------+----------+----------+
| id | value | parent | tree_path|
+----+-----------+----------+----------+
| 1 | Some Text | 0 | |
| 2 | Some Text | 0 | |
| 3 | Some Text | 2 | -2-|
| 4 | Some Text | 2 | -2-|
| 5 | Some Text | 3 | -2-3-|
| 6 | Some Text | 3 | -2-3-|
| 7 | Some Text | 1 | -1-|
+----+-----------+----------+----------+
Selecting all the descendants of the record with id=2 looks like this:
SELECT * FROM comment_table WHERE tree_path LIKE '-2-%' ORDER BY tree_path ASC
To build a tree, you can sort by tree_path to get an array that's fairly easy to convert to a tree.
You can also index tree_path and the index can be used when the wildcard is not at the beginning.
For example, tree_path LIKE '-2-%' can use the index, but tree_path LIKE '%-2-' cannot.

Answer 3

Some recursive function which either return the supervisor (if any) or null. Could be a SP which invokes itself as well, and using UNION.

Answer 4

SQL is a language for performing set operations and recursion is not one of them. Further, many database systems have limitations on recursion using stored procedures as a safety measure to prevent rogue code from running away with precious server resources.
So, when working with SQL always think 'flat', not 'hierarchical'. So I would highly recommend the 'tree_path' method that has been suggested. I have used the same approach and it works wonderfully and crucially, very robustly.