1. Said Salomon Unitrin Direct Insurance timelord@timelordshangout.com T-SQL Avoiding cursors Said Salomon

2.  I have over 25 year experience IT. I have a vast array of abilities in the field in the areas of Network, Desktop Support, DBA, Staff Project Management, Application Software Development, Business Analysis and Quality Assurance. I have Microsoft certifications as MCTS, MCPS, and MCNPS, and multiple certifications from the Insurance Institute of America. Currently I am a DBA at Unitrin Direct Insurance.

3.  A cursor is pointer into a rowset  Allows a single row at a time to be processed  DECLARE c1 CURSOR READ_ONLY

4.  Most programmers have a process a row mindset (read a record process a record)  Complex operations need to be done on each row

5.  SQL is a rowset system  Performance (system impact)  Slower than using rowset logic  Creates locks on the table  more memory to accomplish the same task  require more code to write

6.  Use a case statement  Multiple rowset operations  Use a temp table with IDENTITY  Using User Defined Functions  use a common-table expression (CTE)

7.  Demo

8.  Avoiding cursors with SQL Server 2005 http://bit.ly/cVEOwJ http://bit.ly/cVEOwJ  SQL Cursors - how to avoid them http://bit.ly/dvsVri http://bit.ly/dvsVri  SQL Server 2008, Dev Edition http://bit.ly/L2hJQ http://bit.ly/L2hJQ  My Twitter SaidSalomon