Self-join – data-nerd.blog

Recursive SQL for querying hierarchical data: Part 2 – Levels and Ancestors

Ok, so you’ve stored hierarchical data in a relational database, and written recursive CTEs to query the data and find relationships. Now the application team wants to query hierarchical levels and print the complete ancestry tree. Time to deep dive into some advance CTE constructs.

This is the second post of the series about the Recursive SQL for querying hierarchical data started in the previous post . If you haven’t read it already, I recommend reading it to understand the key concepts:

What is a hierarchical data?
How to store hierarchical data in a relational database?
And how to query hierarchical data using:
- Self-Joins
- Common Table Expressions (CTE)

In this post, we’ll discuss the advanced scenarios like displaying hierarchical levels and printing the “ancestry tree”. Let’s dive in…

Recursive SQL for querying hierarchical data: Part 1

Recently, I was working on an application that required reading hierarchically structured data. And I thought it might be useful to document multiple ways to store and query such hierarchical data (ex. Org. chart, File-system layout, or Set of tasks in a project) in a database. So, let’s jump right in.

Definitions first – what is hierarchical data?

Hierarchical data is a specific kind of data, characterized by a hierarchical relationship between the data sets.

Think about data sets having multiple levels: something above, something below, and a few at the same level. A typical example of such hierarchical model is an organizational chart like the one below.