I use recursive queries like these at work, for hierarchical accounts/groups/locations/equipment/etc. where each level can have permissions that cascade down or

I use recursive queries like these at work, for hierarchical accounts/groups/locations/equipment/etc. where each level can have permissions that cascade down or not. Loading the hundreds of rows into memory necessary to calculate what any particular user can see is very costly in terms of network time, particularly for deeply nested stuff. Much easier to do the legwork in SQL and return the relatively tiny result set. There are certainly other tools that could handle these relationships more gracefully, but they also come with the questions of code integration time/backups/redundancy/scaling/etc, which postgres already has good answers for