that looks quite tricky, can’t really say how make the query faster, but if you could update some attr on the root every time you update some descendant (like :root/recursive-modification-time timestamp), you could simply query all roots based on that

in effect moving the “has some descendant changed” determination from query time to tx time

Hey, I never thanked you for this response, so thank you! When we discussed it on the team that was definitely a solution that came up when we asked "how would we have done this in SQL-land". I personally suspect that something may be wrong with my recursive rules, but I'm still working through some of the details. Jaret posted a great set of questions for us, which I'm working on answering