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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T06:03:53+00:00

I have been reading that cursors are pretty slow and one should unless out

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I have been reading that cursors are pretty slow and one should unless out of options avoid them. I am trying to optimize my stored procedures and one of them uses a cursor. It frequently is being called by my application and with lot of users(20000) and rows to update. I was thinking maybe I should use something else as an alternative.

All I am trying to do or want is to get a list of records and then operate on depending on each row value. So for e.g we have say –

Employee - Id,Name,BenefitId,StartDate,EndDate

So based on benefitId I need to do different calculation using dates between StartDate and EndDate and update employee details. I am just making this contrived example to give a idea on my situation.

What are your thoughts on it ? Are there better alternatives for cursors like say using temp tables or user defined functions? When should you really opt for them or should we never be using cursors ? Thanks everyone for their help.

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  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve changed out cursors and moved from over 24 hours of processing time to less than a minute.

    TO help you see how to fix your proc with set-based logic, read this:
    http://wiki.lessthandot.com/index.php/Cursors_and_How_to_Avoid_Them

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