title: How To Traverse a Tree/Work With Hierarchical data in SQL Code
body: <p>Say I have an employee table, with a record for each employee in my company, and a column for supervisor (as seen below). I would like to prepare a report, which lists the names and title for each step in a supervision line. eg for dick robbins, 1d #15, i'd like a list of each supervisor in his "chain of command," all the way to the president, big cheese. I'd like to avoid using cursors, but if that's the only way to do this then that's ok.</p>
  
  <pre><code>id  fname   lname   title   supervisorid
  1   big     cheese  president   1
  2   jim     william vice president  1
  3   sally   carr    vice president  1
  4   ryan    allan   senior manager  2
  5   mike    miller  manager 4
  6   bill    bryan   manager 4
  7   cathy   maddy   foreman 5
  8   sean    johnson senior mechanic 7
  9   andrew  koll    senior mechanic 7 
  10  sarah   ryans   mechanic    8
  11  dana    bond    mechanic    9
  12  chris   mcall   technician  10
  13  hannah  ryans   technician  10
  14  matthew miller  technician  11
  15  dick    robbins technician  11
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The real data probably won't be more than 10 levels deep...but I'd rather not just do 10 outside joins...I was hoping there was something better than that, and less involved than cursors. </p>
  
  <p>Thanks for any help.</p>