Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Unleashed, Second Edition

Cursors

In contrast to most programming languages, SQL is a set-based processing language. You retrieve sets of rows, update sets of rows, and delete sets of rows. The set of rows affected is determined by the search conditions specified in the query. Unfortunately, most programmers are used to doing record-oriented operations on data and often want to apply the same technique to SQL Server data. Admittedly, at times, processing rows as a single resultset with a single query can seem difficult or impossible.

For example, perhaps you want to update the prices of books in the titles table. For books priced less than $15, you want to increase the price by 15 percent. For books priced $15 or more, you want to decrease the price by 10 percent. For ...