Thanks for the great feedback, Anipaul. The article on my interview has actually been cut back quite a bit... It's actually Rich Bay that I have to thank for my primordial anti-RBAR sentiment.

During the week that Rich was on-site and acting as an SQL Mentor to me when he had the time, I ran into a bit of a problem in SQL and originally resorted to trying to solve the problem with RBAR. Now, Rich had assigned chapters for me to study in the books we bought for my education on SQL Server. I didn't realize it at the time, but he'd intentionally left out the chapters on loops and cursors. Rich is a mild mannered gentleman, but when I asked Rich how I would assign a variable a value from a row so I could loop through the rows, he almost snarled while saying "For that you'd need a cursor... and if you ever write one for something like this, I'm all done teaching you."

Let's just say that particular lesson stuck like glue. 🙂