SQL Cursor Let me say one thing: DON'T use cursors. They should be your preferred way of killing the performance of an entire system. Most beginners use cursors and don't realize the performance hit they have. They use memory; they lock tables in weird ways, and they are slow. Worst of all, they defeat most of the performance optimization your DBA can do. Did you know that every FETCH being executed has about the same performance of executing a SELECT? This means that if your cursor has 10,000 records, it will execute about 10,000 SELECTs! If you can do this in a couple of SELECT, UPDATE or DELETE, it will be much faster. Beginner SQL programmers find in cursors a comfortable and familiar way of coding. Well, unfortunately this lead to bad performance. The whole purpose of SQL is specifying what you want, not how it should be done. I've once rewritten a cursor-based stored procedure and substituted some code for a pair of traditional SQL queries. The table had only...