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Comments on How to break infinite loop in CTE

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How to break infinite loop in CTE

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I have a parent-child relation in my table, with possibly circular cases. Is it possible to break the infinite recursion in CTE checking values of all previous rows? I would need something like this:

with my_cte(childId, parentId, col1)
AS (
SELECT r.childId, r.parentId, r.col1
FROM My_Table r WHERE r.childId = 'x' AND (r.col1 = 1 or r.col1 = 2)
UNION ALL 
SELECT rel.childId, rel.parentId, rel.col1
	FROM My_Table rel INNER JOIN my_cte sd ON rel.childId = sd.parentId where (rel.col1 = 1 OR rel.col1 = 2) AND ...
-- check that rel.childId, rel.parentId not in previous rows
)
SELECT DISTINCT * from shared_documents

How can I achieve this? Or how to approach this?

Example table with records would be:

childId parentId col1
1 3 1
1 4 1
3 5 1
5 1 1 -- circular case
6 2 1
5 7 1

If I ask for hierarchy related to 1, I should get

childId parentId col1
1 3 1
1 4 1
3 5 1
5 1 1 -- circular case
5 7 1
  • 1 has two parents: 3 and 4.
  • 3 has 1 parent: 5
  • 5 has 2 parents: 1 and 7. But 1 brings the infinite loop, so the query should ignore this. And continue to the next row.
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1 comment thread

General comments (4 comments)
General comments

Skipping 3 deleted comments.

artaxerxe‭ wrote about 3 years ago

id isn't relevant. you have to look for childId and parentId.

artaxerxe‭ wrote about 3 years ago

@Estela have a look now at my edited post.

Estela‭ wrote about 3 years ago

Ok, so a line with id=X childId=C and parentId=P means that C is the child of P. I was understanding that C was the child of X and P the parent of X. Another question. Is the relationship transitive? That is, in your example, since 5 is the child of 1 and 1 is the child of 3. Does it mean that 5 should be considered as a child of 3?

artaxerxe‭ wrote about 3 years ago

@Estela the relationship is transitive. I would say that in my case 5 should be considered as a grandchild of 3. But let's see where we get.

Skipping 2 deleted comments.