SQL query for parent-child chain

Question

I have a single table that can refer to one other member in the table as a parent. That parent could also refer to one other row as its parent...and so on.

id     col1     col2    parentID
1      foo      bar       NULL
2      blah     boo       1
3      fob      far       2
4      wob      lob       NULL

I would like to return the chain given an id. So if the id were 3 I would return row 3, row 2 and row 1. If id was 2 I would return row 2 and row 1. If the id were 1 or 4 I would just return that row.

thank you

Answer 1

Use a recursive CTE:

DECLARE @id INT
    SET @id = 3

;WITH hierarchy AS (
  SELECT t.id, t.parentid
    FROM YOUR_TABLE t
   WHERE t.id = @id
 UNION ALL
 SELECT x.id, x.parentid
   FROM YOUR_TABLE x
   JOIN hierarchy h ON h.parentid = x.id)
SELECT h.id
  FROM hierarchy h

Results:

id
---
3
2
1