Find if any parent folder is un-published

I have a requirement where if someone is trying to activate/publish a child folder, I will call the preprocessor and check whether all parent folder to that child is active or not.

if any of the parents is inactive, I will stop the child folder activation. 

Problem - Is there a way to use X-path or SQL query to check for all the parent folder activation.

I am able to check for all parents using the recursive function and its working fine but wanted to check if is there any X-path or SQL or any other simple way to do this.