SQL Cursors…Any use cases you would defend?

Question

I\'ll go first.

I\'m 100% in the set-operations camp. But what happens when the set logic on the entire desired input domain leads to a such a large retrieval that

Answer 1

There are lots of different cursor behaviors.

• STATIC vs KEYSET vs DYNAMIC
• SCROLL vs FORWARD ONLY vs FAST FORWARD
• INSENSITIVE or not
• OPTIMISTIC or READ ONLY or not
• LOCAL vs GLOBAL (at least this is easy)

You should never use a cursor unless you can explain all of these options and which ones are on by default.

And so, I never do.

Instead, when I feel the urge to loop over something in T-SQL... I load it into a variable table, which is something like a LOCAL STATIC SCROLL cursor... except that it can be indexed and joined (edit: and the downside of preventing the use of parallelism).