To find infinite recursive loop in CTE

Question

I\'m not a SQL expert, but if anybody can help me.

I use a recursive CTE to get the values as below.

Child1 --> Parent 1

Parent1 --> Parent 2

Answer 1

Here's an alternate method for detecting cycles in adjacency lists (parent/child relationships) where nodes can only have one parent which can be enforced with a unique constraint on the child column (id in the table below). This works by computing the closure table for the adjacency list via a recursive query. It starts by adding every node to the closure table as its own ancestor at level 0 then iteratively walks the adjacency list to expand the closure table. Cycles are detected when a new record's child and ancestor are the same at any level other than the original level zero (0):

-- For PostgreSQL and MySQL 8 use the Recursive key word in the CTE code:
-- with RECURSIVE cte(ancestor, child, lev, cycle) as (

with cte(ancestor, child, lev, cycle) as (
  select id, id, 0, 0 from Table1
  union all
  select cte.ancestor
       , Table1.id
       , case when cte.ancestor = Table1.id then 0 else cte.lev + 1 end
       , case when cte.ancestor = Table1.id then cte.lev + 1 else 0 end
    from Table1
    join cte
      on cte.child = Table1.PARENT_ID
   where cte.cycle = 0
) -- In oracle uncomment the next line
-- cycle child set isCycle to 'Y' default 'N'
select distinct
       ancestor
     , child
     , lev
     , max(cycle) over (partition by ancestor) cycle
  from cte

Given the following adjacency list for Table1:

| parent_id | id |
|-----------|----|
|    (null) |  1 |
|    (null) |  2 |
|         1 |  3 |
|         3 |  4 |
|         1 |  5 |
|         2 |  6 |
|         6 |  7 |
|         7 |  8 |
|         9 | 10 |
|        10 | 11 |
|        11 |  9 |

The above query which works on SQL Sever (and Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL 8 when modified as directed) rightly detects that nodes 9, 10, and 11 participate in a cycle of length 3.

SQL(/DB) Fiddles demonstrating this in various DBs can be found below:

• Oracle 11gR2
• SQL Server 2017
• PostgeSQL 9.5
• MySQL 8