Avoiding Cursors with SQL Server 2005

(Tim Chapman) How necessary are the use of cursors in SQL Server? In a previous article I showed you how you could write your own custom procedures to loop through a collection of objects, such as tables or databases, and execute statements against those objects. That article used cursors exclusively to loop through the objects. Sometimes cursors are necessary, especially when executing stored procedures against separate records in a SQL Server table. However, when it comes to using queries to return result sets, most of the time cursors can be avoided entirely. Today I am going to look at tricky problem where cursors would traditionally be used, and how you can use features packaged in SQL Server 2005 to avoid them.