Getting non-deterministic results from WITH RECURSIVE cte - snowflake-cloud-data-platform

Question

I'm trying to create a recursive CTE that traverses all the records for a given ID, and does some operations between ordered records. Let's say I have customers at a bank who get charged a uniquely identifiable fee, and a customer can pay that fee in any number of installments:
WITH recursive payments (
id
, index
, fees_paid
, fees_owed
)
AS (
SELECT id
, index
, fees_paid
, fee_charged
FROM table
WHERE index = 1
UNION ALL
SELECT t.id
, t.index
, t.fees_paid
, p.fees_owed - p.fees_paid
FROM table t
JOIN payments p
ON t.id = p.id
AND t.index = p.index + 1
)
SELECT *
FROM payments
ORDER BY 1,2;
The join logic seems sound, but when I join the output of this query to the source table, I'm getting non-deterministic and incorrect results.
This is my first foray into Snowflake's recursive CTEs. What am I missing in the intermediate result logic that is leading to the non-determinism here?

Answer 1

I assume this is edited code, because in the anchor of you CTE you select the fourth column fee_charged which does not exist, and then in the recursion you don't sum the fees paid and other stuff, basically you logic seems rather strange.
So creating some random data, that has two different id streams to recurse over:
create or replace table data (id number, index number, val text);
insert into data
select * from values (1,1,'a'),(2,1,'b')
,(1,2,'c'), (2,2,'d')
,(1,3,'e'), (2,3,'f')
v(id, index, val);
Now altering you CTE just a little bit to concat that strings together..
WITH RECURSIVE payments AS
(
SELECT id
, index
, val
FROM data
WHERE index = 1
UNION ALL
SELECT t.id
, t.index
, p.val || t.val as val
FROM data t
JOIN payments p
ON t.id = p.id
AND t.index = p.index + 1
)
SELECT *
FROM payments
ORDER BY 1,2;
we get:
ID INDEX VAL
1 1 a
1 2 ac
1 3 ace
2 1 b
2 2 bd
2 3 bdf
Which is exactly as I would expect. So how this relates to your "it gets strange when I join to other stuff" is ether, your output of you CTE is not how you expect it to be.. Or your join to other stuff is not working as you expect, Or there is a bug with snowflake.
Which all comes down to, if the CTE results are exactly what you expect, create a table and join that to your other table, so eliminate some form of CTE vs JOIN bug, and to debug why your join is not working.
But if your CTE output is not what you expect, then lets help debug that.