>In my case, it was a treeview, and the recursive approach was used while building the key. Then when the treeview needed to be built, the table was ordered using this key, and the treeview was built within a single linear pass through the records. The main (and practically only) reason for this was speed: the table changed very rarely, but the treeview had to be built many times. So this was just a way to have the results of the recursion saved and ready. The difference in speed turned out to be quite significant, somewhere to 6:1 for 200 records.

Do you think I would obtain the same ratio when working with a cursor? Our cursor is pre-built before creating the treeview object. So, if I have 200 records in it, I'll have 200 records in the treeview. Do you think using linear approach here would make it faster as well?