Select products where the category belongs to any category in the hierarchy

Question

I have a products table that contains a FK for a category, the Categories table is created in a way that each category can have a parent category, example:

Compu         


        

Answer 1

Looks like a job for a Common Table Expression.. something along the lines of:

with catCTE (catid, parentid)
as
(
select cat.catid, cat.catparentid from cat where cat.name = 'Processors'
UNION ALL
select cat.catid, cat.catparentid from cat inner join catCTE on cat.catparentid=catcte.catid
)
select distinct * from catCTE

That should select the category whose name is 'Processors' and any of it's descendents, should be able to use that in an IN clause to pull back the products.

Answer 2

What you want to find is the transitive closure of the category "parent" relation. I suppose there's no limitation to the category hierarchy depth, so you can't formulate a single SQL query which finds all categories. What I would do (in pseudocode) is this:

categoriesSet = empty set
while new.size > 0:
  new = select * from categories where parent in categoriesSet
  categoriesSet = categoriesSet+new

So just keep on querying for children until no more are found. This behaves well in terms of speed unless you have a degenerated hierarchy (say, 1000 categories, each a child of another), or a large number of total categories. In the second case, you could always work with temporary tables to keep data transfer between your app and the database small.

Answer 3

CREATE TABLE #categories (id INT NOT NULL, parentId INT, [name] NVARCHAR(100))
INSERT INTO #categories
    SELECT 1, NULL, 'Computers'
    UNION
SELECT 2, 1, 'Processors'
    UNION
SELECT 3, 2, 'Intel'
    UNION
SELECT 4, 2, 'AMD'
    UNION
SELECT 5, 3, 'Pentium'
    UNION
SELECT 6, 3, 'Core 2 Duo'
    UNION
SELECT 7, 4, 'Athlon'
SELECT * 
    FROM #categories
DECLARE @id INT
    SET @id = 2
            ; WITH r(id, parentid, [name]) AS (
    SELECT id, parentid, [name] 
        FROM #categories c 
        WHERE id = @id
        UNION ALL
    SELECT c.id, c.parentid, c.[name] 
        FROM #categories c  JOIN r ON c.parentid=r.id
    )
SELECT * 
    FROM products 
    WHERE p.productd IN
(SELECT id 
    FROM r)
DROP TABLE #categories   

The last part of the example isn't actually working if you're running it straight like this. Just remove the select from the products and substitute with a simple SELECT * FROM r