Question

How would I redesign the below query so that it will recursively loop through entire tree to return all descendants from root to leaves? (I’m using SSMS 2008). We have a President at the root. under him are the VPs, then upper management, etc., on down the line. I need to return the names and titles of each. But this query shouldn’t be hard-coded; I need to be able to run this for any selected employee, not just the president. This query below is the hard-coded approach.

select P.staff_name [Level1], 
P.job_title [Level1 Title], 
Q.license_number [License 1],
E.staff_name [Level2], 
E.job_title [Level2 Title], 
G.staff_name [Level3], 
G.job_title [Level3 Title]

from staff_view A 
left join staff_site_link_expanded_view P on P.people_id = A.people_id
left join staff_site_link_expanded_view E on E.people_id = C.people_id
left join staff_site_link_expanded_view G on G.people_id = F.people_id
left join facility_view Q on Q.group_profile_id = P.group_profile_id

Thank you, this was most closely matching what I needed. Here is my CTE query below:

with Employee_Hierarchy (staff_name, job_title, id_number, billing_staff_credentials_code, site_name, group_profile_id, license_number, region_description, people_id)
as
(
    select C.staff_name, C.job_title, C.id_number, C.billing_staff_credentials_code, C.site_name, C.group_profile_id, Q.license_number, R.region_description, A.people_id
    from staff_view A
    left join staff_site_link_expanded_view C on C.people_id = A.people_id
    left join facility_view Q on Q.group_profile_id = C.group_profile_id
    left join regions R on R.regions_id = Q.regions_id
    where A.last_name = 'kromer'
)
select  C.staff_name, C.job_title, C.id_number, C.billing_staff_credentials_code, C.site_name, C.group_profile_id, Q.license_number, R.region_description, A.people_id
from staff_view A
left join staff_site_link_expanded_view C on C.people_id = A.people_id
left join facility_view Q on Q.group_profile_id = C.group_profile_id
left join regions R on R.regions_id = Q.regions_id
WHERE C.STAFF_NAME IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY C.STAFF_NAME, C.job_title, C.id_number, C.billing_staff_credentials_code, C.site_name, C.group_profile_id, Q.license_number, R.region_description, A.people_id
ORDER BY C.STAFF_NAME

But I am wondering what is the purpose of the “Employee_Hierarchy”? When I replaced “staff_view” in the outer query with “Employee_Hierarchy”, it only returned one record = “Kromer”. So when/where can we use “Employee_Hierarchy”?

Answer 1

See:

• SQL Server – Simple example of a recursive CTE
• MSDN: Recursive Queries using Common Table Expression
• SQL Server recursive CTE (this seems pretty much like exactly what you are working on!)

Update:

A proper recursive CTE consist of basically three things:

• an anchor SELECT to begin with; that can select e.g. the root level employees (where the Reports_To is NULL), or it can select any arbitrary employee that you define, e.g. by a parameter

• a UNION ALL

• a recursive SELECT statement that selects from the same, typically self-referencing table and joins with the recursive CTE being currently built up

This gives you the ability to recursively build up a result set that you can then select from.

If you look at the Northwind sample database, it has a table called Employees which is self-referencing: Employees.ReportsTo --> Employees.EmployeeID defines who reports to whom.

Your CTE would look something like this:

;WITH RecursiveCTE AS
(
    -- anchor query; get the CEO
    SELECT EmployeeID, FirstName, LastName, Title, 1 AS 'Level', ReportsTo
    FROM dbo.Employees
    WHERE ReportsTo IS NULL

    UNION ALL

    -- recursive part; select next Employees that have ReportsTo -> cte.EmployeeID      
    SELECT 
       e.EmployeeID, e.FirstName, e.LastName, e.Title, 
       cte.Level + 1 AS 'Level', e.ReportsTo
    FROM 
       dbo.Employees e
    INNER JOIN 
       RecursiveCTE cte ON e.ReportsTo = cte.EmployeeID
)
SELECT *
FROM RecursiveCTE
ORDER BY Level, LastName    

I don’t know if you can translate your sample to a proper recursive CTE – but that’s basically the gist of it: anchor query, UNION ALL, recursive query