Question

In T-SQL, when iterating results from a cursor, it seems to be common practice to repeat the FETCH statement before the WHILE loop. The below example from Microsoft:

DECLARE Employee_Cursor CURSOR FOR
SELECT EmployeeID, Title FROM AdventureWorks2012.HumanResources.Employee
    WHERE JobTitle = 'Marketing Specialist';
OPEN Employee_Cursor;

FETCH NEXT FROM Employee_Cursor;
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
    BEGIN
        FETCH NEXT FROM Employee_Cursor;
    END;
CLOSE Employee_Cursor;
DEALLOCATE Employee_Cursor;
GO

(Notice how FETCH NEXT FROM Employee_Cursor; appears twice.)

If the FETCH selects into a long list of variables, then we have a large duplicated statement which is both ugly and of course, “non-DRY” code.

I’m not aware of a post-condition control-of-flow T-SQL statement so it seems I’d have to resort to a WHILE(TRUE) and then BREAK when @@FETCH_STATUS is not zero. This feels clunky to me.

What other options do I have?

Answer 1

Simply said you can’t… that’s just how most where statements in SQL work. You need to get the first line before the loop and then do it again in the while statement.

The better question how to get rid of the cursor and try to solve your query without it.