To Cathi and Kevin,

Thank you guys for this valuable information. As for my case, your methods could use a little tweaking, since in the case of self referencing tables, things can get really missy especially when there is an indefinite level of heirarchy.

Inspired by your posts, I think I finally found a solution:

1- Get all updates (in the order specified by Cathi) of top parents (parent code is null)
2- Perform the appropriate update on the first row.
3- Get updates of all its children (again in the same order mentioned above).
4- Recurse through step 2.
5- Move to the next record and recurse through step 2.

and I think thats it!