Doing magic with SQL is sometimes great in a pinch. But when it takes a 4 page article to display the results of a query that doesn't seem very maintainable to me. If the idea is a one off then great. If it is something that needs to be done and maintained ongoing going, than a less complex -- and likely not as fast -- seems in order.

I've seen lots of discussion about how bad CURSORS, FETCH, and WHILE LOOPS are in SQL Server. However, I use them all the time and and our DB Servers don't suffer at all. Our application/web servers have many more performance issues than our database servers. Furthermore, when I need to modify my stored procs, I can do it pretty easily because I'm not having to mess with a really complex query.

> Nick Duckstein