Question

I`ve got a table with records linking to each other

name  id  manager_id
____________________
adam  1   Null
nick  2   1
sten  3   1
iren  4   3
john  5   2
steve 6   3

I want a Stored Procedure which will return a banch of managers for current worker. For example if i ask for Steve`s managers query result should look like that

steve 6 3
sten  3 1
adam  1 Null

How can it be done?
(it is not necessary to avoid loops for now)

Answer 1

From SQL 2005 onwards, you can use a recursive CTE, like below:

;WITH Managers AS
(
SELECT name, id, manager_id, 1 AS Level 
FROM YourTable
WHERE id = 6
UNION ALL
SELECT t.name, t.id, t.manager_id, m.Level + 1
FROM YourTable t
    JOIN Managers m ON t.id = m.manager_id
)
SELECT * FROM Managers ORDER BY Level DESC

Or, as of SQL 2008, you could use a different approach using the new HIERARCHYID datatype, which is a new way to represent hierarchical data.