The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL

13 Cursors

Bandwagon jumpers make choices based not on merit or value but on brand names, slogans, and tag lines. As long as there are people willing to part with their hard-earned cash for gimmickry, the world will continue to be a place where marketing is more important than what’s marketed.—H. W. Kenton

A cursor is a mechanism for accessing the rows in a table or result set on a piecemeal basis—one at a time. They run counter to SQL Server’s normal way of doing things by parceling result sets into individual rows; fetching a row from a cursor is analogous to returning a single row via a SELECT statement. Unlike a traditional result set, a cursor keeps track of its position automatically and provides a wealth of facilities for scrolling ...