Finding the path in a hierarchical tree in MSSQL 2005
I'm working on an table that uses the adjacency list model to store its hierarchical relationship. In a nutshell, it means my table has a parent-to-child relationship using the a foreign key to point to the parent primary key. While this is efficient for storage (and easy to understand,) this model was always extremely inefficient for retrieving the tree structure in MSSQL—that is until SQL Server 2005.
In SQL Server 2005, Microsoft implemented a new featured called Common Tree Expressions (CTE,) which among other things allow you to transverse an adjacency list model table by using recursion.
A simple example looks like this:
-- get root of the tree
select
employeeId, employee, managerId
from
Employee
where
managerId is null
union all
-- do a recursive lookup
select
child.employeeId, child.employee, child.managerId
from
Employee as child
inner join
EmployeeTree
on
EmployeeTree.employeeId = child.employeeId
)
-- now grab the data from the CTE table
select
employeeId, employee, managerId
from
EmployeeTree
order by
managerId, employeeId
Today I was trying to figure out a good way to determine the path through the tree. I started thinking that the MSSQL 2005's ROW_NUMBER() function would be a good way to do that. A quick Google search brought up an excellent article by Adam Machanic titled Swinging From Tree to Tree Using CTEs, Part 2: Adjacency to Nested Intervals.
It gives pretty thorough examples and even shows how using a CTE you can convert an adjacency list model table into a nested set model table.
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