Re: SQL help requested - "linked list"

"Mia" <nospam_at_cox.net> wrote in message news:3F4A646E.6020305_at_cox.net...
> Bob Badour wrote:
>
> > As I recall, the Oracle syntax for expressing recursion uses a CONNECT
BY
> > clause.
>
> Yes, the CONNECT BY clause lets me do this sort of query.
>
> > Au contraire. If you want to get the IDs that come before or to get the
IDs
> > that come after a particular ID, you care only about order.
>
> Huh?. As I said before, I don't care about the order.

Exactly which ID's did you want again? If you don't care about order, you obviously can not care about the ID's in the list that come before the given ID, because then you would be querying based on the order in the list. Likewise, you can not care about the ID's in the list that come after the given ID, because again that would depend only on the order of the ID's in the list.

> > What, if not implicit order, does the juxtaposition of ID and NEXTID
> > provide?
>
> One of them gives me the ID that precede the entry point; the other
> gives me the ones that follow.

How can anything precede or follow without order?

> > One must ask: What does this implicit order mean? How does it arise in
the
> > first place? If a human puts the rows into some order, upon what
information
> > does the human base the decisions? Can one represent this information
> > directly?
>
> I did not design the data model; I'm just trying to do some queries
> against it. For my requirements, the order is completely irrelevant.

If you insist. Received on Mon Aug 25 2003 - 23:30:59 CEST