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I’m told that when designing stored procedures, set based operations scale better than cursor based ones.
Can someone give a succinct explanation of why this is?
As succinctly as I can manage:
In relational database engines, all operations (whether in stored procedures or not) will usually* scale better using set-based logic simply because these engines are optimised for performing set-based operations.
There is a generally a fixed resource cost (which may be quite high) for a single atomic operation in the engine, whether it affects 1 or 1,000,000 rows.
Cursors incur even higher costs because the database engine must maintain the state of the cursor on top of the atomic operation cost.
*there are going to be a few edge cases/classes of problem (exactly which will depend on your RDBMS) in where procedural logic will perform better than set-based.