Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on How to break infinite loop in CTE

Parent

How to break infinite loop in CTE

+5
−0

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.
History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

General comments (4 comments)
Post
+2
−0

For small tables you can bound the recursion depth:

WITH my_cte(childId, parentId, depth, max_depth)
AS (
    SELECT r.childId, r.parentId, 1, (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM My_Table)
    FROM My_Table r
    WHERE r.childId = 1

UNION ALL

    SELECT rel.childId, rel.parentId, sd.depth + 1, sd.max_depth
    FROM My_Table rel INNER JOIN my_cte sd ON rel.childId = sd.parentId
    WHERE sd.depth < sd.max_depth
)
SELECT DISTINCT childId, parentId
FROM my_cte

This approach is limited by the bound that MAXRECURSION <= 32767.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

General comments (1 comment)
General comments
artaxerxe‭ wrote over 3 years ago

@Peter, the only problem with this is that if you get cycles, you will do unnecessary work.