Kevin

Am I mistaken? Certainly even pre-SQL Server 2005 one could write a stored procedure that did almost exactly the same thing as the code below?

>Consider an employee table. Every employee has a chief (Chief_fk), except the chairman (.NULL). Now given an employee, give me the entire path from that employee to the chairman. The record based solution is far simpler than the set oriented solution:
>
>
>USE EMPLOYEE
>GO RECCOUNT()*RAND() && Get a random record
>? Firstname+" "+Lastname
>DO WHILE SEEK(Chief_fk,"Employee","emp_pk")
> ?? "\"+Firstname+" "+Lastname
>ENDDO
>
>Walter,
>
>FWIW, T-SQL in SQL Server 2005 allows developers to build recursive queries through common table expressions:
>
>

WITH ResultSet (FirstName, LastName, Parent_PK_Value)
>   AS (SELECT FirstName, LastName, Chief_FK
>       FROM Employee
>          WHERE Emp_PK = <somekey>                                          -- anchor query
>       UNION ALL
>          SELECT Employee.FirstName, Employee.LastName, Chief_FK            -- recursive query
>             FROM Employee
>               INNER JOIN ResultSet ON Parent_PK_Value = Employee.Emp_PK)
>
>SELECT * FROM ResultSet

>
>I've run this on a small table (few thousand rows), I'm curious to try it on something larger.
>
>Kevin