T-SQL Cursors

Forget cursors. I haven’t used them for years....

In the majority of situations where you would like to iterate through one way through a record set it makes sense just to create a temporary table with an identity field on it and two variables (@i and @maxi).

Now instead of going through the bother overhead and extra lines of code of declaring the cursor, opening the cursor, iterating though it and closing it, you can accomplish the same by a simple while loop and a few set statements.

 

Create table #temp

(

i int identity,

description varchar(max)

)

 

Insert into #temp (description)

Select ‘car’

 

Insert into #temp (description)

Select ‘bike’

 

Declare @i int

Declare @maxi int

Set @i = 1

 Select @maxi = max(i) from #temp

While @i <= @maxi

Begin

 

                Select * from #temp where i = @i

                Set @i = @i + 1

End

 

Perhaps it’s just me but unless you need a cursor to do something specifically that couldn’t be done here I will continue using the much simpler and lightweight method above.