Question

I’ve had some bad experiences with cursors causing deadlocks. I have been trying to eliminate cursors wherever possible. When they are unavoidable, I try minimize the amount of work done while the cursor is open.

Is it ever better to copy the data to a table variable, and build a cursor over the table variable?

I know the answer will likely depend on the size of the data set. At them moment, I am concerned with a very small, data set (a handlefull of records), that is rarely updated. On occasion I will still have create complex loops over large data sets.

Is there any benefit to copying to table variables, or am I over-complicating things?

Answer 1

If you define the cursor as STATIC when you declare it, SQL Server will make a temporary copy of the data for you automatically.

From the documentation:

STATIC

Defines a cursor that makes a temporary copy of the data to be used
by the cursor. All requests to the
cursor are answered from this
temporary table in tempdb; therefore,
modifications made to base tables are
not reflected in the data returned by
fetches made to this cursor, and this
cursor does not allow modifications.