PostgreSQL CTE with recursive query returning unexpected row counts
I'm refactoring my project and I've been working on this all day and I'm working on a PostgreSQL 13 project where I need to retrieve hierarchical data using a recursive Common Table Expression (CTE)... The query aims to fetch all descendants of a particular node in a tree structure, but I'm getting fewer results than expected. The base case returns 1 row, but the recursive part seems to be incomplete. Here’s the query I’ve written: ```sql WITH RECURSIVE descendants AS ( SELECT id, parent_id, name FROM categories WHERE id = 1 -- starting from root node with id = 1 UNION ALL SELECT c.id, c.parent_id, c.name FROM categories c INNER JOIN descendants d ON c.parent_id = d.id ) SELECT * FROM descendants; ``` When I run this query, I see that it only returns 3 rows, while there should be 10 descendants of the root node. The structure of my `categories` table is as follows: - `id` (integer, primary key) - `parent_id` (integer, foreign key referencing `id` of the same table) - `name` (text) I’ve verified the data and there are indeed 10 children and grandchildren linked under the node with `id = 1`. When I run a simple query like `SELECT * FROM categories WHERE parent_id = 1`, it returns the expected children. I also tried adding an `ORDER BY` clause to the final `SELECT`, but it didn’t change the number of rows returned. I suspect it might have something to do with how PostgreSQL handles recursive queries or perhaps a missing condition in the recursive part. Is there something I’m missing here? Any advice on how to troubleshoot this would be greatly appreciated! My development environment is macOS. Is there a better approach? For context: I'm using Sql on Windows 10.