We don't need no stinkin' cursors!

Good link Ryan.

When setting up our development environment with a new copy of the live
database, we run a procedure to delete or mangle any personally
identifiable customer information, as the environment is not as secure as
our others. The old procedure was a series of cursor driven while-loops
running over each customer record. On the old hardware of our dev system
it took upwards of eight hours. I attacked the procedure last month,
stripping out all the cursors I could, and have brought it down to about
twenty minutes.

On 18 Jun 2010 09:16:54 -0500, "Ryan Creps"
wrote:
> I was moved by the Tessi-Spirit this morn' to evangelize all ye SQL nuts
> out there.� If you have an interest in furthering your T-SQL skills, a
> good best practice to learn is how to avoid the use of cursors.� Here's
a
> good demonstration of the overhead of using them:
>
> http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/cursors/65040/
>
> --
> View this message online at
> http://www.tessituranetwork.com/COMMUNITY/forums/p/2743/9326.aspx#9326
[1]
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--
Gawain Lavers f. 510.643.6707

Good link Ryan.

When setting up our development environment with a new copy of the live
database, we run a procedure to delete or mangle any personally
identifiable customer information, as the environment is not as secure as
our others. The old procedure was a series of cursor driven while-loops
running over each customer record. On the old hardware of our dev system
it took upwards of eight hours. I attacked the procedure last month,
stripping out all the cursors I could, and have brought it down to about
twenty minutes.

On 18 Jun 2010 09:16:54 -0500, "Ryan Creps"
wrote:
> I was moved by the Tessi-Spirit this morn' to evangelize all ye SQL nuts
> out there.� If you have an interest in furthering your T-SQL skills, a
> good best practice to learn is how to avoid the use of cursors.� Here's
a
> good demonstration of the overhead of using them:
>
> http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/cursors/65040/
>
> --
> View this message online at
> http://www.tessituranetwork.com/COMMUNITY/forums/p/2743/9326.aspx#9326
[1]
> or reply to this message
> --
> This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com
> because you subscribed to the Tessitura Technical Forum. You may reply
to
> this message to post to the Technical forum or visit the site to search,
> read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts
> from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message
text
> from your reply before sending. Thank you!
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1]
http://www.tessituranetwork.com/COMMUNITY/forums/p/2743/9326.aspx#9326

--
Gawain Lavers f. 510.643.6707

Ryan,

Great post. I've always been told to avoid cursors.  And it has absolutely given me better chops as a query writer.  Forces you to think of alternate paths to the same result.