I'm working with a database that has a locations table such as:
locationID | locationHierarchy
1 | 0
2 | 1
3 | 1,2
4 | 1
5 | 1,4
6 | 1,4,5
which makes a tree like this
1
--2
----3
--4
----5
------6
where locationHierarchy is a csv string of the locationIDs of all its ancesters (think of a hierarchy tree). This makes it easy to determine the hierarchy when working toward the top of the tree given a starting locationID.
Now I need to write code to start with an ancestor and recursively find all descendants. MySQL has a function called 'find_in_set' which easily parses a csv string to look for a value. It's nice because I can just say "find in set the value 4" which would give all locations that are descendants of locationID of 4 (including 4 itself).
Unfortunately this is being developed on SQL Server 2014 and it has no such function. The CSV string is a variable length (virtually unlimited levels allowed) and I need a way to find all ancestors of a location.
A lot of what I've found on the internet to mimic the find_in_set function into SQL Server assumes a fixed depth of hierarchy such as 4 levels maximum) which wouldn't work for me.
Does anyone have a stored procedure or anything that I could integrate into a query? I'd really rather not have to pull all records from this table to use code to individually parse the CSV string.
I would imagine searching the locationHierarchy string for locationID% or %,{locationid},% would work but be pretty slow.