SQL Cursors are fine as long as you use the correct options: INSENSITIVE will make a temporary copy of your result set (saving you from having to do this yourself for your pseudo-cursor). READ_ONLY will make sure no locks are held on the underlying result set.

Jun 18, 2014 · This article provides an explanation about performance problems caused by using SQL Server cursors, describes why these cursors exist

Aug 27, 2024 · By avoiding cursors and using set-based operations, you can significantly improve performance in SQL Server. Here’s an example that illustrates the difference between using a cursor and using a...

Aug 29, 2017 · I have a table tblLogins which has 200k users data saved in it. I need to insert 30 records for each user in an another table. I used the cursor for this task. But the script I have written takes a lot of time. It has inserted data only for 60 thousand users in 2 hours.

Mar 23, 2019 · Keep in mind SQL Server, as a modern RDBMS system, performs much better with set operations. Here is simplified version of a real cursor that was used to update a big table with over 200 million rows.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the SQL Server cursor to process a result set, one row at a time.

Jul 22, 2023 · An object called a database cursor makes it possible to browse through the rows of a result set. Unlike TSQL commands that operate on all the rows in the result set at one time, it enables you to handle a single row from the result set of a query.

Dec 7, 2023 · Transact-SQL cursors and API cursors have different syntax, but the following general process is used with all SQL Server cursors: Associate a cursor with the result set of a Transact-SQL statement, and define characteristics of the cursor, such as whether the rows in the cursor can be updated.

Jul 3, 2023 · In this blog post, I will describe the problem the client was facing, walk through the T-SQL code they were using, and explain how I was able to improve the query performance by replacing the cursor with a common table expression (CTE).

Apr 26, 2025 · Cursors can consume more server resources (CPU, memory) compared to set-based solutions, especially when dealing with large datasets. Cursors process data row-by-row. This can be significantly slower than set-based operations that process entire datasets in parallel.