Best method to verify multi-level relational dependencies

Question

Suppose you have entities A, B, C and D.

• D relates to C
• C relates to B
• B relates to A

Furthermore, user is only allowed to <

Answer 1

I'm not sure I understand what you want to achieve but can't you use option A, to verify if user is allowed to operate on D with only one access to the database?:

SELECT D.*
  FROM D
    JOIN C 
      ON C.id = D.cid
    JOIN B
      ON B.id = C.bid
    JOIN A.id = B.aid
WHERE A.ownedBy = @userID
  AND D.id = @idToBechecked  

Answer 2

The obvious solution would be this: Given D, find C, then find B and eventually find A. If the chain breaks somewhere, access to D would be rejected. Unfortunately, this requires - if trivially implemented - 4 database accesses instead of just the one for A.

I suppose that might be possible. It depends in part on what "relates to" means, but assuming a relatively straightforward schema, I'd expect you to be able to join all four tables in a single SQL statement. If part of the chain is missing, the query would return no rows.

Or am I missing something?