However, by selecting all the descendants at once, you do have all the information to build a tree within your program. I'm guessing here, but I would think that doing it in memory would still be faster than doing it with multiple selects.

I would concede to those with more experience though :)

Clint

Update I'm assuming that by selecting all of the objects, you are also receiving the parent_id of each object, which would give you the information to build the tree.