Recursive Tree Traversal and While Loops in SQL Server: A Performance Comparison
3 min readDec 19, 2023
Navigating hierarchical data in databases is a common challenge in software development. In SQL Server, two popular methods for traversing such data are Recursive Common Table Expressions (CTEs) and WHILE
loops. In this blog post, we'll explore these two methods, complete with code examples, and discuss which one is typically more optimal in various scenarios.