Recursive sum in tree structure

Question

I have a tree struture in a single table. The table is a tree of categories that can be nested endlessly. Each category has a ProductCount column that tells how many product

Answer 1

I couldn't come up with a good T-SQL, set based answer, but I did come up with an answer: The temp table mimics your table structure. The table variable is a work table.

--Initial table
CREATE TABLE #products (Id INT, ParentId INT, NAME VARCHAR(255), ProductCount INT)
INSERT INTO #products
        ( ID,ParentId, NAME, ProductCount )
VALUES  ( 1,-1,'Cars',0),(2,-1,'Bikes',1),(3,1,'Ford',10),(4,3,'Mustang',7),(5,3,'Focus',4)

--Work table
DECLARE @products TABLE (ID INT, ParentId INT, NAME VARCHAR(255), ProductCount INT, ProductCountIncludingChildren INT)
INSERT INTO @products
        ( ID ,
          ParentId ,
          NAME ,
          ProductCount ,
          ProductCountIncludingChildren
        )
SELECT  Id ,
        ParentId ,
        NAME ,
        ProductCount,
        0
FROM #products

DECLARE @i INT
SELECT @i = MAX(id) FROM @products

--Stupid loop - loops suck
WHILE @i > 0
    BEGIN
        WITH cte AS (SELECT ParentId, SUM(ProductCountIncludingChildren) AS ProductCountIncludingChildren FROM @products GROUP BY ParentId)
        UPDATE p1
        SET p1.ProductCountIncludingChildren = p1.ProductCount + isnull(p2.ProductCountIncludingChildren,0)
        FROM @products p1
        LEFT OUTER JOIN cte p2 ON p1.ID = p2.ParentId
        WHERE p1.ID = @i

        SELECT @i = @i - 1
    END

SELECT *
FROM @products

DROP TABLE #products

I'd be very interested to see a better, set based approach. The problem I ran into is that when you use recursive cte's, you start with the parent and work toward the children - this doesn't really work for getting a sum at the parent levels. You'd have to do some kind of backward recursive cte.