battelofhalfwits (1/1/2009)
Wow...Two things
1) Never use Cursors! Looping through a temp table takes less overhead than a Cursor; especially when you are working on a 24/7/365 server where you really need to watch your resources.
I want to echo this. I have encountered situations where there was no way around doing row-by-row inserts (database conversion / merger where a stored proc needed to be run to generate values for each line) but when it was first written with cursors our conversion process was going to take about 3 days to run. After replacing the cursors with temp tables and while loops the process was cut down to a few hours. I've never seen a situation where I could not replace a cursor and benefit.
D.