Walking an org hierarchy

Question

Accepted Answer

The anchor selects the root employee (id = 1). The recursive member joins employees to the CTE - each iteration finds employees whose manager_id matches any id already in the result set. This walks down the tree level by level until no new reports are found. The final WHERE id != 1 excludes the root from the output. A simple WHERE manager_id = 1 would only return direct reports, missing everyone further down.