Recursive CTE’s

This article will be discussing recursive Common Table Expressions (CTEs). Recursive CTEs are unique, such that they are allowed to reference their own. With this special ability, you can use recursive CTEs in solving problems where other queries cannot. Recursive CTEs are best in working with hierarchical data such as org charts for the bill of materials.

If you’re unfamiliar with CTE’s, then I highly recommend that you read the Introduction to Common Table Expressions. Once you get familiar, then you can come back to this article. We will dig deeper into the reasons why you would want to use recursive CTEs. In addition, this article comes with some great examples.

Note: All examples provided in this article are based on the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and the AdventureWorks2012 database. You can get started using these FREE tools with my guide, Getting Started Using SQL Server.

Introduction

A recursive CTE is a common table expression that references itself. Try to look up for the definition of recursion on Google and you’ll see that recursion is defined as “the repeated application of a recursive procedure or definition.” Its Latin root, recurrere, means to “run back.”

We will soon find out that both the modern definition and its Latin root serve well in explaining this concept.

What is recursion?

Recursion can be quite abstract and difficult to understand. Before we go further into our learning with recursive CTEs, let us first look at the example given to have a general concept.

How Many People Are in front of me in a line?

There is no doubt that you have been in a long line before and have wondered how many people were standing before you. Sort of standing on your tippy-toes and trying to count heads, is there another way to find the answer?

Sure, you could ask the person in front of you – what place they were in line. If you know this, then you could just add one to it, in order to know your place!

Using recursion to get the answer, we could use these instructions:

At first, the instructions are passed from person to person in line. Eventually, we get to the front of the line and that person has no one else to pass the instructions forward. So instead, they tell the person behind them they are “1”.

This, in turn, signals the person behind them, to add “1” to the number they were told and pass it back to the person behind them.

This repeats until the end of the line is reached. At this point, the person who was wondering how long the line just needs to add one to get the answer.

Let’s see how this works visually. In the diagram below you can see where each person is forwarding the instructions to the next person in line.

At some point, we reach the first person in the line. They see there is no one in front of them and stop passing the notes. This is the terminating condition. As you can imagine, it is important to have a terminating condition. If one didn’t exist, then we would try passing the note indefinitely. In computer terms, we would be in an infinite loop.

Finally, the first person in the line gets the instructions, realizes there is no one else to pass them to. At this point, he turns around to the person behind him and says he is “1.”

The second guy gets the number “1,” adds “1” to it, and passes back “2.”

This continues on for each person until there is no one left. At this point, the last person in line now knows their position.

Note: This example is inspired by Aaron Krolik’s answers to a recursion question on Quora.

What Makes Recursion?

A recursive routine has three main parts:

Invocation – This is the part of your query or program that calls the recursive routine.

Recursive Invocation of the Routine – This is the part of the routine that calls itself

Termination Check – This is the logic that makes sure we eventually stop calling the routine, and start providing answers.

Let’s take the example instructions from the above example: and identify the three parts:

Invocation – You hand the blue card to the last person in line.

Recursive Invocation – Each person is told to pass the direction to the person in front.

Termination Check – You check to see if there is no one in front of you.

Recursive CTEs

A recursive CTE is a CTE that references itself. In doing so, the initial CTE is repeatedly executed, returning subsets of data, until the complete result is returned.

Being able to reference itself is a unique feature and benefit. It allows recursive CTE’s to solve queries problems that would otherwise require the use of temporary tables, cursors, and other means.

Recursive CTE’s are well suited to querying hierarchical data, such as organization charts or production bill of materials, where each product’s components are made up of subcomponents, and so on.

The general syntax for a recursive CTE is:

WITH cte_name (column1, column2, …) AS ( cte_query_definition -- Anchor member UNION ALL cte_query_definition -- Recursive member; references cte_name. ) -- Statement using the CTE SELECT * FROM cte_name

The general layout is similar to a non-recursive CTE. It is defined using WITH, consists of a query definition, and precedes the statement using the CTE.

Yet, there are significant differences. A recursive CTE must contain a UNION ALL statement and, to be recursive, have a second query definition that references the CTE itself.

Let’s look at a simple example.

Below is a recursive CTE that counts from 1 to 50.

WITH cte AS (SELECT 1 AS n -- anchor member UNION ALL SELECT n + 1 -- recursive member FROM cte WHERE n < 50 -- terminator ) SELECT n FROM cte;

Here are the results:

There are many parts involved in this query, let’s look at them:

This recursive CTE consists of three main parts:

Invocation – This is the statement using the CTE. Anchor Member – This portion executes first and is only called once. Recursive Member – The portion of the query is repeatedly executed until no rows are returned. The results of each execution are unioned with the prior results. Termination Check – The termination check ensures the query stops.

When this query is run the Anchor Member is run once and its derived rows combined, via the UNION ALL, with the Recursive Member.

This query is repeatedly run until no rows are returned. This is why the termination check is so important.

If we weren’t checking for N < 50, the query would always return a row, thus complete with an error. Here is an example of the error you can expect if the termination check is missing or faulty:

Msg 530, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 The statement terminated. The maximum recursion 100 has been exhausted before statement completion.

Of course, there may be an instance where the maximum recursion should be greater than 100. In this case you can adjust it using the MAXRECURSION query hint. Here we’ve increased the recursion to 200.

WITH cte AS (SELECT 1 AS n -- anchor member UNION ALL SELECT n + 1 -- recursive member FROM cte WHERE n < 50 -- terminator ) SELECT n FROM cte OPTION (MAXRECURSION 200);

When writing a Recursive CTE keep in mind the following guidelines:

A recursive CTE must contain at least an anchor member and recursive member. Multiple anchor and recursive members can be defined, but all the anchor members should be before the first recursive member.

The number of columns and their corresponding data types should be the same between the anchor and recursive members. This makes sense, as this is a condition for UNION ALL.

The FROM clause of the recursive member can only refer to the CTE expression once.

In addition, the following items are not allowed in the recursive member query definition:

GROUP BY

HAVING

LEFT, RIGHT, or OUTER JOIN

Scalar aggregation

SELECT DISTINCT

Subqueries

TOP

Note: For a more complete list of guidelines and restrictions, please see the MSDN article WITH common_table_expression (Transact-SQL)

Let’s move on to a more comprehensive example.

Retrieve a Bill of Materials using a Recursive Common Table Expression

The Adventure Works company manufactures bicycles, and as you can imagine, they contain a lot of parts! To keep it all straight the production department has put together a bill of materials or BOM for short.

A BOM lists all the parts for each bike. Bikes are made up of many larger parts, called sub-assemblies, which in turn are made up of other sub-assemblies or components.

This creates a hierarchy of sorts with the product at the top. You can think of this as a parent-child relationship. The parent is the sub-assembly, and the parts making up the sub-assembly of the children.

For instance, for a Bike, the wheel would be a sub-assembly, which is composed of a rim and spokes.

Here are the table relationships for the AdventureWorks2012 BillOfMaterials:

As you can see all products (parts) are listed in the Product table. The BillOfMaterials table contains pairs of ProductID numbers:

ProductAssemblyID – The sub-assembly containing the part (parent)

ComponentID – Part in the subassembly (child)

These are foreign keys referring to Product.ProductID values.

Given this suppose we want a list of a product sub-assemblies and its constituent parts? How can we do this?

Getting a list of the top-level parts is pretty straight forward. They would be products corresponding to BillOfMaterials entries whose ProductAssemblyID is NULL. Here is a query to get those products:

SELECT P.ProductID, P.Name, P.Color FROM Production.Product AS P INNER JOIN Production.BillOfMaterials AS BOM ON BOM.ComponentID = P.ProductID AND BOM.ProductAssemblyID IS NULL AND (BOM.EndDate IS NULL OR BOM.EndDate > GETDATE());

And the resulting products:

So how do we get the products and their sub-assemblies?

One idea is to write another query that gets all products whose ProductAssemblyID is one of the top-level products and use a UNION ALL to combine the results. We can easily do this with a subquery:

SELECT P.ProductID, P.Name, P.Color FROM Production.Product AS P INNER JOIN Production.BillOfMaterials AS BOM ON BOM.ComponentID = P.ProductID AND BOM.ProductAssemblyID IS NULL AND (BOM.EndDate IS NULL OR BOM.EndDate > GETDATE()) UNION ALL SELECT P.ProductID, P.Name, P.Color FROM Production.Product AS P INNER JOIN Production.BillOfMaterials AS BOM ON BOM.ComponentID = P.ProductID AND (BOM.EndDate IS NULL OR BOM.EndDate > GETDATE()) AND BOM.ProductAssemblyID IN (SELECT P.ProductID FROM Production.Product AS P INNER JOIN Production.BillOfMaterials AS BOM ON BOM.ComponentID = P.ProductID AND BOM.ProductAssemblyID IS NULL AND (BOM.EndDate IS NULL OR BOM.EndDate > GETDATE()) ) ;

The blue portion is the query returning the top-level products. The green portion returns the sub-assemblies, and the portion in red is the subquery used to return the set of ProductID’s for the top-level products used to match ProductAssemblyID’s.

But there is an issue with the query. It only returns Products or sub-assemblies used in the top-level products. Sub-assemblies contained within these sub-assemblies aren’t considered.

Of course, we could continue to write queries to “dig” deeper into the hierarchy, but can you imagine? The queries would get really long, complicated, and always limited by the number of queries union together.

This is where recursive CTE’s shine.

By using recursion, we’re able to use the self-referring nature of the CTE to continue to dig into deeper levels of the BOM. Much like the counting example, we showed previously, with the following recursive CTE, the common table expression is repeatedly called until the termination condition is met. In this query’s case, that is once no further sub-assemblies or components are found.

Here is the recursive CTE you can try:

WITH cte_BOM (ProductID, Name, Color, Quantity, ProductLevel, ProductAssemblyID, Sort) AS ( SELECT P.ProductID, CAST (P.Name AS VARCHAR (100)), P.Color, CAST (1 AS DECIMAL (8, 2)), 1, NULL, CAST (P.Name AS VARCHAR (100)) FROM Production.Product AS P INNER JOIN Production.BillOfMaterials AS BOM ON BOM.ComponentID = P.ProductID AND BOM.ProductAssemblyID IS NULL AND (BOM.EndDate IS NULL OR BOM.EndDate > GETDATE()) UNION ALL SELECT P.ProductID, CAST (REPLICATE('|---', cte_BOM.ProductLevel) + P.Name AS VARCHAR (100)), P.Color, BOM.PerAssemblyQty, cte_BOM.ProductLevel + 1, cte_BOM.ProductID, CAST (cte_BOM.Sort + '\' + p.Name AS VARCHAR (100)) FROM cte_BOM INNER JOIN Production.BillOfMaterials AS BOM ON BOM.ProductAssemblyID = cte_BOM.ProductID INNER JOIN Production.Product AS P ON BOM.ComponentID = P.ProductID AND (BOM.EndDate IS NULL OR BOM.EndDate > GETDATE()) ) SELECT ProductID, Name, Color, Quantity, ProductLevel, ProductAssemblyID, Sort FROM cte_BOM ORDER BY Sort;

The anchor member, which is used to retrieve the top-level products is in blue. The recursive member` is colored green. The recursive CTE is invoked by the portion colored black.

Here is the Bill of Materials results:

Some things that important to note with this query are:

You’ll notice several columns are explicitly cast as VARCHAR(100). This to ensure the data types are the same for corresponding columns within the anchor and recursive query definition. The level is incremented by one upon each recursive query definition call. The anchor query starts with 1, and incremented from there. The level is used to help indent sub-assemblies within products. We use the REPLICATE string function as a helper. A sort field is constructed from using product and sub-assembly names. If this wasn’t done, then there wouldn’t be a convenient way to order the results by sub-assembly.

The sort field is a key concept. When a recursive CTE runs remember it first gathers all the top-level product IDs. Then it uses these to collect products used in those assemblies. This process repeats until no further product ID is found.

Because of this, rows are returned one level at a time. This is called a breadth-first search. For a BOM we typically want to drill into a sub-assembly and then its component parts or sub-assemblies. This is called a depth-first search.

In order to simulate this, we construct the sort field. The sort field is constructing the “path” of assemblies (think subfolders on your computer). When these paths are sorted, the items appear in depth-first-search order.

Conclusion

Common table expressions come in handy when you need to simplify a query. Though some would contend that using recursive CTEs doesn’t lend to this goal, as they can be conceptually difficult to understand, they provide a means for an elegant solution.

There are many types of queries that are difficult to solve without recursive CTE’s. Querying hierarchical data is one of these. Of course, you can write looping structures to achieve the same goal, but if you don’t have the means to write and execute a stored procedure, then recursive CTE’s allow you to do so using a SELECT statement alone.