I think Brad took it personal!!! This article is an opinion and it is up to us to discuss and bring our comments in how to improve the a way to work with cursors. I believe that sometimes cursors might be useful, but after 30 years of programming in different languages and DB, there is always a better way to do it. For instance I was checking a process that was updating some records on a table, and noticed that the process was taken long time to execute, then I check on the code and found that there was a cursor but the problem was not in the cursor itself but in the way the cursor was used; it was updating the table record by record, so I took the result to a temp table and performed a massive update on the final table. What a surprise a process that it was taken more that 30 min. was reduced to 2-3 minutes and even less. In other hand, sometime programmers are assign to do certain taks and they tend to have "TEMPLATES" in their head and are not capable to think out of the box, that is why if you team lack of programming standards and code QA/QC and/or DBA team that approves the code the result is obvious. Remember we work base on FACTS and Barry have an opinion that we have to be intelligent enough (Do not take it personal) to contribute by providing a solution or giving you opinion that stands against the article. Finally I agreed with gautamsheth200 by doing a "Select count(*) From master.sys.columns C1 CROSS JOIN master.sys.columns C2" you have the same result, but once again you have to analyze the situation and see if you are able to improve the code, by the way from 23 to 1 second by the solution presented.

Best regards to all

Vinicio Aizpurua

Systems Analyst/Developer/DBA