A virtual relation (or view) can be defined with a recursive statement that is a function of one or more base relations. In general, the number of times such a statement must be applied in order to retrieve all the tuples in the virtual relation depends on the contents of the base relations involved in the definition. However, there exist statements for which there is an upper bound on the number of applications necessary to form the virtual relation, independent of the contents of the base relations. Considering a restricted class of recursive statements, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for statements in the class to have this bound.