Ah yes, because the cursor is non-static it would have to check for updates to its data before the next fetch.

If the sp is updating the data the cursor uses then this would be costly.

I would therefore go beck to using a static cursor (ir it fetches all the data first then iterates through the recordset).

I have been doing a test just iterating through 800K rows of a table, fetching data only...

A static cursor took 8.5 secs to iterate through the whole lot

A noral cursor took 17.5 secs

and the table variable based approach took 30 secs!!!!

This was all running on my machine not the server, I will maybe test same scenario on the server and report back...

Cheers

Bob