A bit of an odd example to pick. All that effort to avoid using a cursor on an example that executes dbcc checkdb for each of just a few rows. Surely the time it takes time to parse a cursor in this example is totally insignificant when compared to the time taken to do a 'dbcc checkdb' for each database?

Also, when you say "Imagine scaling the cursor to tables with millions of rows". I'm imagining it! Are you sure that inserting the rows into a temporary table with no index and deleting each row, in a loop, on an individual basis, and selecting the count(*) from the table for each row would actually be quicker than using a cursor to just scan through a recordset? :crazy: