The problem with that is that it kind of breaks SQL to traverse the list.

Let's say you have a 1M element list, and you want to get the first 100 elements. Normally you would write something like:

  > select top(100) * ... order by itemPosition asc

To walk a linked list, you'd either have to:

- walk it on the client, one query per element, resulting in way too many roundtrips to the server.

- get all the data in one go and then walk it on the client. Here we're selecting and returning 1M records and throwing most of those away.

- walk the list in the database with a recursive common table expression. CTE's aren't appropriate for this; it'll be slow, and we'll run up against a recursion limit for large lists.

- walk the list in the database with cursors/loops/etc. Very icky, and breaks composability.