I'm not sure what you are doing. Actually, I have no clue what you are doing, and I can't figure out without the missing functions. But I do know this code will be a nightmare to maintain. Requiring 8 functions (children_proc children_sql, level_proc, level_sql, path_proc, path_sql, setlevel and the block outside the functions) to populate a structure from a database is a sure sign something is wrong. If you want some help, please specify what you want for output (what you want your structure to look like).