• Allow me to make some observations.

    1: This article was insulting. I am an intelligent professional with many years of experience. I design my code thoughtfully and carefully and my projects are successful because of it. I read articles that challenge me to change my practices because I am always willing to learn and improve. This article was not in that category.

    2: This article was only nominally about cursors but really had little to do with them. From rambling analogies to amateur psychological observations, and insults, this was more of an exercise in creative writing than something designed to aid a person who is seriously interested in optimizing their code. If you wish to be of assistance to anyone, get to the heart of the matter. We are database programmers, not marketers. It is perfectly ok to use big words and get technical.

    3: If you are going to use an example, and you wish to have credibility, make your example a good one. Take a close look at the straw cursor example. Even though it has only a few lines in it, it has two significant technical problems. The first is that it does nothing (I can save you even more precious processing power with the delete key and wipe out that code entirely). The second is that, even for this useless example, the cursor is built wrong. Take a close look at it and see if you can determine what is wrong with it. I'll give you a hint, it is not a syntactical problem.

    This is the type of problem I have seen in 100% of the articles like yours that claim the cursor is a thing to be scorned from the archaic past - none of them show a properly built cursor. This definitely impacts my perception as to the credibility and ability of the author. If you make mistakes that I do not tolerate in junior programmers, then how am I to take anything you say subsequently as being worth serious consideration? I do make use of cursors for some of my processes and, I can assure you, that the instances where I use them, one would not be able to improve either performance or readability with their removal.

    Finally, If you can offer some advice as to how I can improve the quality of my work, I am only too happy to take it. If you insist on trivializing my work and insulting my intelligence, I will take note of that as well.

    Brad Neufeld

    Data Architect