First, thanks for your time. Sorry If I'm communicating poorly.

Imagine the sets describe locations: North America, USA, Georgia, Fulton County, Atlanta.

I might describe this relationship in a relationship table (I'm excluding the actual person and set tables and using names instead of Ids for clarity):

Parent Set | Child Set

============================

North America | USA

USA | Georgia

Georgia | Fulton County

Georgia | Dekalb County

Fulton County | Atlanta

Dekalb County | Decatur

Person | Set

================

Joe | Atlanta

Jane | Decatur

Now, I have an extremely frequent and latency-sensitive query that says "Give me all the people (or sets) under Georgia". My thought is to make this query really fast by projecting it into this shape:

Person | Contained By

==============

Joe | Atlanta

Joe | Fulton County

Joe | Georgia

Joe | USA

Joe | North America

Jane | Decatur

Jane | Dekalb County

Jane | Georgia

Jane | USA

Jane | North America

And then another one for SetsContainedBy.

Sadly, Using actual snowflake schema has two distinct disadvantages in my case, the first is that sets (and dimensions) are really dynamic, and that I can have sets be child to multiple other sets (for example, Atlanta actually lies in two counties, Fulton and Dekalb).

I hope that clarifies my goal, and why the recursion seems like an obvious win to a non-dba. Thanks again.