SQL For Dummies, 8th Edition

Chapter 13

Recursive Queries

In This Chapter

Understanding recursive processing

Defining recursive queries

Finding ways to use recursive queries

One of the major criticisms of SQL, up through and including SQL-92, was its inability to implement recursive processing. Many important problems that are difficult to solve by other means yield readily to recursive solutions. Extensions included in SQL:1999 allow recursive queries — which greatly expand the language’s power. If your SQL implementation includes the recursion extensions, you can efficiently solve a large new class of problems. However, because recursion is not a part of core SQL, many implementations currently available do not include it.

What Is Recursion?

Recursion is a feature that’s been around for years in programming languages such as Logo, LISP, and C++. In these languages, you can define a function (a set of one or more commands) that performs a specific operation. The main program invokes the function by issuing a command called a function call. If the function calls itself as a part of its operation, you have the simplest form of recursion.

A simple program that uses recursion in one of its functions provides ...