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PRIOR

Applies to ✅ Open Source Edition   ✅ Express Edition   ✅ Professional Edition   ✅ Enterprise Edition

The PRIOR operator allows for specifying an expression from the parent (the "prior") row in the hierarchy. This can be used mainly in the CONNECT BY clause itself.

SELECT
  child,
  parent,
  sys_connect_by_path(child, '/')
FROM (
  VALUES
    (1, null),
    (2, 1),
    (3, 2)
) AS t (child, parent)
START WITH
  parent IS NULL
CONNECT BY NOCYCLE
  PRIOR child = parent;
Field<Integer> child = field("child", INTEGER);
Field<Integer> parent = field("parent", INTEGER);

ctx.select(
            child,
            parent,
            sysConnectByPath(child, "/"))
      .from(values(
            row(val(1), val(null, INTEGER)),
            row(2, 1),
            row(3, 2)).as(table("t"), child, parent))
      .startWith(parent.isNull())
      .connectByNoCycle(prior(child).eq(parent))
      .fetch();

The result being, for example

+-------+--------+---------------------+
| child | parent | sys_connect_by_path |
+-------+--------+---------------------+
|     1 | {null} | /1                  |
|     2 |      1 | /1/2                |
|     3 |      2 | /1/2/3              |
+-------+--------+---------------------+

Dialect support

This example using jOOQ:

prior(AUTHOR.ID)

Translates to the following dialect specific expressions:

Exasol, Informix, Oracle, Redshift, Snowflake

PRIOR AUTHOR.ID

ASE, Access, Aurora MySQL, Aurora Postgres, BigQuery, ClickHouse, CockroachDB, DB2, Databricks, Derby, DuckDB, Firebird, H2, HSQLDB, Hana, MariaDB, MemSQL, MySQL, Postgres, SQLDataWarehouse, SQLServer, SQLite, Sybase, Teradata, Trino, Vertica, YugabyteDB

/* UNSUPPORTED */
Generated with jOOQ 3.21. Support in older jOOQ versions may differ. Translate your own SQL on our website

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