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I have to compute a value involving data from several tables. I was wondering if using a stored procedure with cursors would offer a performance advantage compared to reading the data into a dataset (using simple select stored procedures) and then looping through the records? The dataset is not large, it consists in 6 tables, each with about 10 records, mainly GUIDs, several nvarchar(100) fields, a float column, and an nvarchar(max).
That would probably depend on the dataset you may be retrieving back (the larger the set, the more logical it may be to perform inside SQL Server instead of passing it around), but I tend to think that if you are looking to perform computations, do it in your code and away from your stored procedures. If you need to use cursors to pull the data together, so be it, but using them to do calculations and other non-retrieval functions I think should be shied away from.
Edit: This Answer to another related question will give some pros and cons to cursors vs. looping. This answer would seem to conflict with my previous assertion (read above) about scaling. Seems to suggest that the larger you get, the more you will probably want to move it off to your code instead of in the stored procedure.