So the three questions I'm hoping someone can answer are:

1.Should I be using a CURSOR here or is there an alternative that will get the same recursive result?

No, you should not. The CURSOR keep being opened over and over. Thinking of the overhead make me cringe. Personally, I stay away from CURSORs.

2.How can I get the results back in a single result set so that it can be used in the same fashion as a subselect?

3.What is the proper way of using the results from the CALL because I can't at least as far as I've tried get the sample SELECT statement above to work? I believe this is because I can't use CALL inline but I'm not sure.

I would like to bail you out of this by suggesting something I learned from my college days when learning about data structures. You need to perform tree traversal using a queue. This allows you to start at a root and express all descendants of a tree.

The algorithm goes like this

• STEP 01 : Start with an empty queue
• STEP 02 : Dequeue Node From the Front of the Queue
• STEP 03 : Enqueue All Children of the Latest Node
• STEP 04 : Process Info From the Latest Node
• STEP 05 : If the Queue is Not Empty, Go Back to STEP 02
• STEP 06 : All Done

This allows you to traverse a recursive structure without using Programmatic Recursion. At this point, you are probably asking: How can I traverse a tree structure without recursion?

I wrote a post about how to script three Stored Procedures that can using a loop in a single CALL that will traverse a table with nodes and its parent in a table:

• GetParentIDByID
• GetAncestry
• GetFamilyTree

The post is Find highest level of a hierarchical field: with vs without CTEs (Oct 24, 2011). It contains the Stored Procedures already written that will traverse the following table structure:

+------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field      | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id         | int(11)      | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment | 
| parent_id  | int(11)      | YES  |     | NULL    |                | 
| name       | varchar(255) | YES  |     | NULL    |                | 
| notes      | text         | YES  |     | NULL    |                | 
+------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

Please read the code carefully and apply the principles.

Give it a Try !!!