I was doubtful of the solution posed in this artcle also, so I did my own tests. I got similar results as found by bobjbian.  The static cursor beat all comers for larger result sets.  As the result set got smaller, the times between the 3 styles got closer.  I suppose for very small result sets (<100 rows?) that the temp table might have less overhead than a cursor, but it's only marginal.

No doubt the SP called by the article performed an update to the underlying table causing the cursor to to be updated.  So while the table variable may have helped the performance, so too would a STATIC cursor.  And the STATIC cursor would have been faster than the table variable.

- J