There are server level options to handle the type of read commitments, these are called transaction isolation levels and they are outside of the scope of this article. If it was not the case a concurrent use could come along and SELECT rows from the table that are half updated and half not updated. This is in order to protect data consistency.
#Ms sql cursors update
But in order to be able to update the entire table SQL Server often has to create a huge lock that blocks all other activity on the same table. This is OK for small transactions as they are lightning fast and do not require locks on large chunks of the underlying tables. Concurrent queries: Sometimes, in OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) systems, there are just too many users actively querying a specific table.I can think of a couple right off the bat: However, there are some situations in which cursors can be lifesavers. Therefore, as a general rule of thumb, and for good performance do not use cursors. The logic behind cursors can be perfect and the idea of writing one can seem good but one runs into real problems when it comes to performance because SQL Server is no longer about to treat whole chunks of data at once and instead has to repeat reads and writes for each result (which can be catastrophic for I/O performance) It is a common trap that developers fall into and for good reason. It is for this reason, and sadly so, that SQL Server cursors are often very prolific in some applications. In the IT Engineering world it is common place for people to learn languages like C#, VB, java, C++ or any other the other iterative-type languages before having to deal with SQL in any real/advanced way.
#Ms sql cursors code
Many other programming languages including C# and Visual Basic are iterative or procedural programming languages whereby the general flow of things is to treat each instance of an object separately and when dealing with many objects one would tend to loop over the same code until the stack is diminished and processed.Ĭursors however, like WHILE loops, break away from the transactional nature of T-SQL and allow for programmers to treat each result of a SELECT statement in a certain way by looping through them. The database engine is optimized to work in this manner and, in general, it is more than sufficient to execute simple all-in-one type transactions. This means that it is designed to execute its work in all-or-nothing runs. SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS), and T-SQL is a transactional programming language. Transactional versus Procedural Programming So this article takes a step back and provides an explanation as to what SQL Server cursors can be used for as well as a basic example that you can run for yourself to test.
#Ms sql cursors how to
Most people that work with Microsoft SQL Server will have at least heard talk of cursors and often, even if people know on a basic level what SQL Server cursors do, they are not always certain when to use them and how to write the code behind them.