Wonderful! Just some possibilities for optimization of the recursive CTE. (I haven't tested it and don't know if it'd automatically improve things.) WITH

Wonderful! Just some possibilities for optimization of the recursive CTE. (I haven't tested it and don't know if it'd automatically improve things.) WITH RECURSIVE _recursive_cte AS MATERIALIZED ( … ) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-with.html#QUERIES-WITH-CTE-MATERIALIZATION https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-with.html#QU... Basically makes the temp table from your other implementation for you. Then you could use built-in cycle detection to be able to simply the syntax while also allowing UNION ALL instead of UNION for some extra speed. CYCLE id SET is_cycle USING path https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-with.html#QUERIES-WITH-CYCLE https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-with.html#QU... > As far as I know, SQL was never even intended to do that in the first place. 49 years ago, certainly not. Postgres still can't beat a dedicated graph database for non-trivial hierarchies, but a lot of work has already been done in the last five years to get it a lot closer to that milestone.