Hi Alvin.

What I am trying to accomplish is to write a query that will be supplied a root value.. ie A and I want to find the downlines..

What would make this process much easier is to implement a "rip field" and update it using a trigger. This is what I mean by a rip field is a field that concatenates the PK's of all the ancestor node for a given node. In your example, these would be the rip fields:

A - A*
B - A*B*
C - A*C*
D - A*B*D*
E - A*B*E*
F - A*B*D*F*
J - A*C*J*
H - A*C*H*
G - A*B*E*G*

Then, to get the downline for any given node, let's use node C as an example here, you query just looks like this:

SELECT * FROM nodes WHERE ripfield LIKE 'A*C*%'

Is this what you are looking for?