This is possibly my longest title to date – I try to keep them short enough to fit the right hand column of the blog without wrapping – but I couldn’t think of a good way to shorten it (Personally I prefer to use the expression CTE – common table expression – over “factored subquery” or “subquery factoring” or “with subquery”, and that would have achieved my goal, but might not have meant anything to most people.)
If you haven’t come across them before, recursive CTEs appeared in 11.2, are in the ANSI standard, and are (probably) viewed by Oracle as the strategic replacement for “connect by” queries. Here’s a simple (and silly) example: