Self referential table and recursive SQL function

[dqsohy4hey]

I have a category table with:

• categoryID
• parentCategoryID
• categoryName

and an items table with:

• itemID
• categoryID
• itemName

I am using MySQL. i want to write a query that will return a count of Items in a category given a categoryID. The query should return total count for all items in all subcategories of the given category.I hope this makes sense.. sorry if i am not using the correct nomenclature.