I see that there is at least one person who has accused me of plagiarism. I can assure you that this is not the case and that this is a piece of code which has been recently implemented by myself in one of our enterprise solutions.

I do, however, agree to the point that I should have been more explicit in describing a few things, especially a little more insight as to why using a WHILE construct gives better results (which it certainly does in my case!) than a CURSOR routine. But then not everyone is good at writing articles and I am just learning the art here .

As for my comment that using WHILE is better than using CURSORS: I understand(as I have noticed as well), and do correct me if I am wrong, that the inherent design of CURSOR implementation within SQLServer causes inconsistent locking and extra IO. This can be avoided using the WHILE technique since all you are doing is re-running the SQL statement one after the other. In my implementation this is all the more important since there is heavy usage of OUTPUT stored procedures which , unfortunately, cannot be used in simple SELECT statments.

Lastly, to answer the question "where do people get the idea that cursors are bad"

I say: experience