Ed Pollack (5/22/2014)

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wbellman (5/22/2014)

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There's also a "background" element to consider. I tend to see cursors crop up when it's language programmers (C#,VB,etc) trying to think in SQL. They tend to think imperatively because that's how they've been trained. However SQL tends to be functional in philosophy.

Perhaps a bit into the theory behind *why* cursors are bad would be helpful. The biggest hurdles I tend to run into is not the what to do instead of cursors, it's the breaking devs of the comfortable imperative practices. Once they understand they are trying to fit square pegs in round holes the discussions tend to go a little smoother.

So... an article like "Transformative Thinking", perhaps?

hmmmm...What do you think Steve? I've put in a few cursor-killing articles, but they were very focused on specific scenarios. There is a treasure-trove of cursor-related articles on the site, but I couldn't find one (in my brief searching) that was theoretical---all took specific problems & tackled them with little background as to why a cursor is bad.