On fös, 2006-09-29 at 15:00 -0700, chester c young wrote: > in a simple tree structured table > > table t( > id primary key, > pnt_id references t( id ), > name > ); > > does anyone know an easy howbeit sneaky way of determining ancestory > and decendency without recursive functions,
how about CREATE TABLE ancestry ( ans_id int, desc_id int ) for each record of t , for each ancestor of id, insert a record (ans_id,id) into anscestry this can be maintained by application, or by triggers. to get all ancestors of a particular id X: SELECT name from t JOIN ancestry ON (id=ans_id) WHERE desc_id=X; to get descendents: SELECT name from t JOIN ancestry ON (id=desc_id) WHERE ans_id=X; indexes on ancestry(ans_id) and ancestry(desc_id) might be called for. hope this helps gnari ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org