EXPLAIN EXTENDED

Answering questions asked on the site.

James asks:

Your series on hierarchical queries in MySQL is tremendous! I'm using it to create a series of threaded conversations.

I'm wondering if there is a way to paginate these results.

Specifically, let's say I want to limit the conversations to return 10 root nodes (parent=0) and all of their children in a query.

I can't just limit the final query, because that will clip off children. I've tried to add LIMITs to your stored functions, but I'm not getting the magic just right.

How would you go about doing this?

A quick reminder: MySQL does not support recursion (either CONNECT BY style or recursive CTE style), so using an adjacency list model is a somewhat complicated task.

However, it is still possible. The main idea is storing the recursion state in a session variable and call a user-defined function repeatedly to iterate over the tree, thus emulating recursion. The article mentioned in the question shows how to do that.

Normally, reading and assigning session variables in the same query is discouraged in MySQL, since the order of evaluation is not guaranteed. However, in the case we only use the table as a dummy recordset and no values of the records are actually used in the function, so the actual values returned by the function are completely defined by the function itself. The table is only used to ensure that the function is called enough times, and to present its results in form of a native resultset (which can be returned or joined with).

To do something with the logic of the function (like, imposing a limit on the parent nodes without doing the same on the child nodes), we, therefore, should tweak the function code, not the query that calls the functions. The only thing that matters in such a query is the number of records returned and we don't know it in design time.

Limiting the parent nodes is quite simple: we just use another session variable to track the number of parent branches yet to be returned and stop processing as soon as the limit is hit, that is the variable becomes zero.

Let's create a sample table and see how to do this:
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