Posted by David Portas on 02/27/06 14:19

Doug wrote:
> interesting take on cursors.
> I have never used cursors in client code. seemed pretty inefficient to
> pass all that crud across the net, and leave the cursor open until the
> clients cpu can process it.
>

That's true. Usually most processing should happen at the server. I
didn't mean to imply otherwise. A client recordset is a cursor of sorts
and that's what I was referring to.

> i've used cursors extensively in stored procedures.
>

Really? For most production tasks I'd say that more than 99% of data
manipulation can best be done without a cursor. Certainly if you make
"extensive" use of cursors then I'd suggest you should be looking
harder for better solutions. That's unless you are writing lots of
metadata management or admin processes. For example I think I've
written maybe 3 or 4 cursors in the last 6 years and all were for
DBA-type tasks.

--
David Portas, SQL Server MVP

Whenever possible please post enough code to reproduce your problem.
Including CREATE TABLE and INSERT statements usually helps.
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