Defining the parent/child relationship v16

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To determine the children for any given row:

  1. Evaluate parent_expr on the given row.

  2. Evaluate child_expr on any other row resulting from the evaluation of table_expression.

  3. If parent_expr = child_expr, then this row is a child node of the given parent row.

  4. Repeat the process for all remaining rows in table_expression. All rows that satisfy the equation in step 3 are the children nodes of the given parent row.

Note

The evaluation process to determine if a row is a child node occurs on every row returned by table_expression before the WHERE clause is applied to table_expression.

Iteratively repeating this process, treating each child node found in the prior steps as a parent, constructs an inverted tree of nodes. The process is complete when the final set of child nodes has no children of its own. These are the leaf nodes.

A SELECT command that includes a CONNECT BY clause typically includes the START WITH clause. The START WITH clause determines the rows that are to be the root nodes, that is, the rows that are the initial parent nodes upon which to apply the algorithm.

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