SQL Community and the Curse of The Cursors

So following form my last post, Eric Alsop’s session for the SQL Community last night was on cursors of course.  His simple but effective presentation showed up a couple of scenarios where cursors are still useful weapons in an DBA’s armoury despite all the new stuff put into SQL standards and SQL Server over the years.  Basically Cursors are still the only way to perform operations on a dataset where you need to understand the position of a record in a set, particularly where this is fed into aggregations, for example in running totals.

What was also good about his talk was the lively debate that it started and this is where being there is important. Podcasts and blogs have their place (otherwise why would i be writing this?), but they are not nearly as interactive as a good chat over beer and pizza.

We also got a very good session on 64bit computing from Christian Bolton of COEO, which help to demystify the use of AWE in a 64 bit installation, and another lively debate on page file sizes on a 64-bit memory.  The top tip here is to set a realistic max memory setting for SQL Server on any 64 bit machine leaving enough for worker threads, the rest of the OS and any other applications  on the box such as third party backup, anti-virus software, minesweeper etc.

To find out more about these sessions check the events on SQL Community site in the next couple of days (when the decks are posted).  Oh and one other thing a date for your diaries SQL Bits vNext Hatfield polytechnic 13th September.

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