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Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed
book

Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed

by Ray Rankins, Paul Bertucci, Chris Gallelli, Alex T. Silverstein
September 2010
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
1704 pages
111h 8m
English
Sams
Content preview from Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed

Cursors and Performance

In contrast to most other programming languages, SQL is a set-based processing language. You retrieve sets of rows, update sets of rows, and delete sets of rows. The set of rows affected is determined by the search conditions specified in the query. Unfortunately, most programmers are used to doing record-oriented operations on data and often want to apply the same technique to SQL Server data. Admittedly, at times, processing rows as a single result set with a single query can seem difficult or impossible. However, because of the performance implications, cursors should not be used just because it’s easier to program that way.

Note

SQL Server 2008 introduces the new MERGE statement, which provides another set-oriented ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780768696585Purchase book