Ok, so one of my last posts talked about using a cursor for something and I came upon some criticism and/or some wincing about the fact that I used that horrible word.  However, cursors like anything have gotten a bad rap (xp_cmdshell is another).  People, there’s nothing wrong with using cursors as long as it’s what’s actually needed.  The problem comes with frontend coders writing cursors for everything and severely abusing this feature. 

But there’s nothing inherently wrong with them… esp for admin tasks.  There are so many legitimate uses for cursors I can’t even come close to naming them all, but here are a few…

Doing something to every DB on a server.

Doing something to every schema in a DB.

Doing something to every table in a schema.

Doing something to every user/login acct (like running changeUsersLogin to correct a ghosted user acct issue).

These are all perfectly legitimate uses of a cursor, whether it’s T-SQL or powershell.  So let’s get ove rthis hangup we’ve got against both the concept and the word.  There’s nothing wrong with it as long as you do it right.  Afterall, what is a cursor anyway?  It’s a way to store a list of values so you can perform an action on each one of them.  And the alternative is to hardcode each one of those lines yourself or use the GUI for everything and we all know that’s completely unacceptable. 

And in powershell everything you do is a cursor… even things that don’t need them.  Of course, they call it a foreach loop, but that’s just a more acceptable name for a cursor isn’t it?  It’s more specific… foreach one of these things, I want to do this…  hell, even almost every backup routine I’ve seen in the shops I’ve been in, and on the web cursor through the DBs on a server and back them up.

So deciding to not use cursors (or at least wince at them) because they get misused by some is like refusing to use a hammer on a nail because of someone you saw trying to open a banana with one.  It wasn’t the right tool for the job so it messed things up.  But it IS the right tool for a nail.