I think we might be failing by asking them to get "it". They get the Excel metaphor and I say use that until they realize they've outgrown it, then they'll...

It's not easy to be a good manager OR a good employee, both take experience and feedback. The most effective feedback comes from a mentor if you can find one,...

Thanks again to all who posted (or will post). Its a good thread! I'll plan to do a follow up to compare the various cursor options to while loops. I...

I think thats a good point Merrill. Cursors can do a lot of work for you if you need them to, managing keysets or the entire table in tempdb so...

Rebuilding is usually going to cause the size to balloon as SQL allocates working storage for indexing/reindexing. You can reduce it some by doing indexes singly and running really frequent...

Micheal,

Keep in mind Im not advocating the wide spread usage of cursors. As an industry we've made decent progress towards set based ops and I'd like to see that continue.

"A...

Its not just as simple as rewriting the code to handle multiple rows. It can be, but not always. One concern is - should all stored procedures be built to...

Yes, outer tran would hurt you. You replace it by just building in some type of restartability (or planning to do it if something breaks). As long as the internal...

Do you have a 'before' copy? Might be useful to compare sp_spaceused results table by table. I dont know if its likely or not, but you could have been off...

Well, at least Phil read the article!

Colin, I totally agree about the while loop = cursor. I haven't measured the true overhead of each, but I would be surprised if the cursor wasn't cheaper in some...

Can you post the code?

Was a tongue in check question:-) I dont see any issue with the link, think its well within the bounds of what the community would consider ok. The comment was...

Herb, are you his/her agent?

Thanks for the follow up. If you ever run into it again, I'd be curious what the query plan looked like, determine why those spurious entries were causing so much...