"Orchid XP v7" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47b2038c$1@news.povray.org...
>
> Right. So is it that cursors are inherantly evil? Or just that people
> tend to misuse them to do row-based processing when they could and
> should do set-based?

In order, no, yes.

They have their place. I often use them for mainenance stuff (run through
all the user databases on the server and do a consistency check on each)
It's when people use cursors for things that are better set based (run
through all rows in the table and update one column of each) that there's a
problem.

> I was under the vague impression that a cursor is a thing that allows
> you to, say, show 1 page of results, and then fetch the next page a bit
> later...

Nope. That's paging. Lots of set-based solutions to that (exact
implementation depending on the db engine you want to run it)

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