I have to agree with Jeff Moden on the need for better T-SQL skills especially to think and work in sets of data -- not in a procedural fashion.  I'm currently working on a project that was developed by folks who were more experienced at .NET development than T-SQL and it shows in the huge number of cursors, loops, scalar functions, overuse of complex views for minor use cases and multiple layers of embedded stored procedures.  While it produces the expected result, the performance is just abysmal!  There is an incredible amount of work performed that is summarily ignored or thrown away when there are simpler, set-based methods to achieve the same results that are better performing and simpler to develop. SMH :crazy: