My bumper sticker can beat up your bumper sticker! 😀

There is a Clarke's law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he's very probably right. When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is not possible, he's very probably wrong." I do love statements that fall in the same flavor as Catch-22.

I have yet to have a need to place cursors in production code, though I do use them occasionally for one-off or management purposes. I also don't do While loops, and I've never seen a need for Goto. Heck, I usually don't remember they're there!

My only quibble with the editorial is the concept of public peer review. I can see the use, but it just doesn't seem practical at the project level. I'm finishing up a file transfer process that's a five step scheduled job with SFTP, batch files, two DTS packages, and copying data between network shares. It also sends emails, and both the email and batch files are built by DTS. There is no way I could post something like that for public review without writing a novel, not to mention having to go through and obfuscate site-specific information for security purposes.

We buy almost all of our apps from vendors, so I can't do anything directly with their code. Everything I do from a development view is to add functionality that interfaces with or reports from the canned systems.

Write the best you can. If it performs well and the execution plan is reasonable and the results are correct, that may be the best you can do. If it doesn't perform well, there's a site called sqlservercentral.com where you can post your code along with table structures and insert statements to build out a dummy load where I've heard there are a few pretty helpful people who can give you a hand.