I had read an article about using "exists" instead of "In". I think it mentioned that exists would just check for a condition to find out if its true or...

Thanks a lot, Earl. Interesting solution. I briefly looked at the article.. that seems to be exactly what I was looking for. Looks like it should work fine for me...will...

Thanks Jonathan. The result set I am expecting would look like this for the 1st query:

select topicid from topics where topicid = 1 or (any topic that has a parentid...