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Recursive CTEs

Steve Jones gives a simple recursive CTE example and an important lesson on compounding:

Recursion is an interesting computer science technique that stumps lots of people. When I was learning programming, it seemed that recursion (in Pascal) and pointers (in C), were the weed out topics.

However, they aren’t that bad, and with CTEs, we can write recursion in T-SQL. I won’t cover where this might be used in this post, though I will give you a simple CTE to view.

There are two parts you need: the anchor and the recursive member. These are connected with a UNION ALL. There can be multiple items, but we’ll keep things simple.

You can play query golf and find a way to remove the recursion, but it’s good to know how to create a recursive CTE.  It’s also good to know that you typically do not want recursion in a database process…