Just wanted to add, this is a perfect use case for the EXISTS clause with a correlated sub query.

I've always had a theory that there are two kinds of coders: mechanics and poets. I'm more of a poet myself - if the code looks wrong or ugly or...

I've dealt with this kind of thing a few different ways.

The first thing to remember is that hierarchical data represents a relationship. In your case, there is a one-to-many relationship...