Processing Sequentially Through a Set of Records(1)November 19, 2003 T-SQL Programming Part 3 - Processing Sequentially Through a Set of Records By PHP/http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/article.php/3111031">Gregory A. Larsen
At some point you will have some business logic that will require you to process sequentially through a set of records one record at a time. For example you may have a list of databases, and for each database you may want to build a command that will perform some process against each database. Or you might have a set of records where you want to process through each record one at a time, so you can select additional information from another table based on the information contained in each record. This article will discuss two different ways to process through a set of records one record at a time.
Using a Cursor
The first method I will discuss uses a cursor to process through a set of records one record at a time. A cursor is basically a set of rows that you define based on a record set returned from a query. A cursor allows applications a mechanism to process through a result set one row at a time. With a cursor an application is allowed to position itself to a specific row, scroll back and forth, and a number of other things. It would take a series of articles to describe all the functionality of a cursor. For the purpose of this article I'm only going to focus on how to use the default scrolling functionality of a cursor. This default functionality will only read from the first row to the last row in a cursor, one row at a time. I will leave additional cursor topiCS to another article series.
