Good eye on the Top 0 - I was trying to just get an alternative posted quickly and obviously didnt test well enough.

I'll grant your point that my example doesnt meet your requirements in all cases (or heck, even in many maybe). I'll take another shot at it this weekend if time permits - I still believe in trying to achieve a set based solution first. Server side cursors are expensive. Keep in mind that I wasnt arguing against your solution - as I mentioned in my earlier post it depends on a lot of things before you call it a 'bad' solution.

My job here is to try to evangelize best practices crossed with common sense and try to offer ideas for alternatives. In this case IF you could accomplish the goal with either a cursor or a set based solution, Im betting the set based one will use less resources and execute faster. The trick is - can you figure out a set based solution in the same amount of time you can figure out a cursor based one? Most developers know how to write loops, so when a problem looks complex they tend to revert to what they know. Sometimes that is the only way - might be in this case! The second part of the discussion is if you can't build a set based solution, I'd vote for doing the loop in the middle tier, not the data tier.

We've got a similar discussion under way in the T-SQL forum, you might want to look at that as well. Hope you'll continue to participate, you'd started a discussion that I think a lot of our readers will benefit from. And remember, you've got Jon to thank for getting you into this!

Andy