How to traverse a hierarchical tree-structure structure backwards using recursive queries

Question

I\'m using PostgreSQL 9.1 to query hierarchical tree-structured data, consisting of edges (or elements) with connections to nodes. The data are actually for stream networks, but

Answer 1

UPDATE 2: I rewrote the original recursive query so that all accumulation/aggregation is done outside the recursive part. It should perform better than the previous version of this answer. This is very much alike the answer from @a_horse_with_no_name for a similar question.

  WITH 
    RECURSIVE search_graph(edge, from_node, to_node, length, area, start_node) AS
    (
        SELECT edge, from_node, to_node, length, area, from_node AS "start_node"
        FROM tree
        UNION ALL
        SELECT o.edge, o.from_node, o.to_node, o.length, o.area, p.start_node
        FROM tree o
    JOIN search_graph p ON p.from_node = o.to_node
    )
    SELECT array_agg(edge) AS "edges"
       -- ,array_agg(from_node) AS "nodes"
          ,count(edge) AS "edge_count"
          ,sum(length) AS "length_sum"
          ,sum(area) AS "area_sum"
    FROM search_graph
    GROUP BY start_node
    ORDER BY start_node
;

Results are as expected:

 start_node | edges       | edge_count | length_sum |  area_sum
------------+-------------+------------+------------+------------
  1         | {A}         |          1 |        1.1 |       0.9
  2         | {B}         |          1 |        1.2 |       1.3
  3         | {C}         |          1 |        1.8 |       2.4
  4         | {D,B,A}     |          3 |        3.5 |       3.5
  5         | {E,D,C,B,A} |          5 |        6.4 |       6.8