Re: Nested sort, trying again

Bob Stearns wrote:
> In this case the tree is sorted in the order I want to present it to my
> users. Consider the tree z(y(x,w),v(y(t,s))) which would have a similar
> representation to the first on but which I wish to present to my users as:
>
> z
> v
> u
> s
> t
> y
> w
> x
> The question is: Is there an easy (relatively) way to produce this sort
> without a recursive sql user defined function?

I can't prove that's impossible, but here is some hand waving. Your output sorted the output by materialized path string

z

z.v
z.v.u
z.v.u.s
z.v.u.t

and the only way to produce such materialized path is recursion, or at least, a list aggregate function. Received on Thu Sep 29 2005 - 23:23:54 CEST