EDIT after @NealB solution: the @NealB's solution is very very fast comparated with any another one, and dispenses this new question about "add a constraint to improve performance". The @NealB's not need any improve, have O(n) time and is very simple.
The problem of "label transitive groups with SQL" have an elegant solution using recursion and CTE... But this solution consumes an exponential time (!). I need to work with 10000 itens: with 1000 itens need 1 second, with 2000 need 1 day...
Constraint: in my case is possible to break the problem into pieces of ~100 itens or less, but only to select one group of ~10 itens, and discard all the other ~90 labeled itens...
There are a generic algotithm to add and use this kind of "pre-selection", to reduce the quadratic, O(N^2), time? Perhaps, as showed by comments and @wildplasser, a O(N log(N)) time; but I expect, with "pre-selection" to reduce to O(N) time.
(EDIT)
I try to use alternative algorithm, but it need some improvement to use as solution here; or, to really increase performance (to O(N) time), need to use "pre-selection".
The "pre-selection" (constraint) is based on a "super-set grouping"... Stating by the original "How to label 'transitive groups' with SQL?" question t1 table,
table T1
(original T1 augmented by "super-set grouping label" ssg, and more one row)
ID1 | ID2 | ssg
1 | 2 | 1
1 | 5 | 1
4 | 7 | 1
7 | 8 | 1
9 | 1 | 1
10 | 11 | 2
So there are three groups,
g1: {1,2,5,9} because "1 t 2", "1 t 5" and "9 t 1"g2: {4,7,8} because "4 t 7" and "7 t 8"g3: {10,11} because "10 t 11"
The super-group is only a auxiliary grouping,
ssg1: {g1,g2}ssg2: {g3}
If we have M super-group-items and N total T1 items, the average group length will be less tham N/M. We can suppose (for my typical problem) also that ssg maximum length is ~N/M.
So, the "label algorithm" need to run only M times with ~N/M items if it use the ssg constraint.