Microsoft SQL Server Cursors Basic Forward Only Cursor
Example
Normally you would want to avoid using cursors as they can have negative impacts on performance. However in some special cases you may need to loop through your data record by record and perform some action.
DECLARE @orderId AS INT
-- here we are creating our cursor, as a local cursor and only allowing
-- forward operations
DECLARE rowCursor CURSOR LOCAL FAST_FORWARD FOR
-- this is the query that we want to loop through record by record
SELECT [OrderId]
FROM [dbo].[Orders]
-- first we need to open the cursor
OPEN rowCursor
-- now we will initialize the cursor by pulling the first row of data, in this example the [OrderId] column,
-- and storing the value into a variable called @orderId
FETCH NEXT FROM rowCursor INTO @orderId
-- start our loop and keep going until we have no more records to loop through
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
PRINT @orderId
-- this is important, as it tells SQL Server to get the next record and store the [OrderId] column value into the @orderId variable
FETCH NEXT FROM rowCursor INTO @orderId
END
-- this will release any memory used by the cursor
CLOSE rowCursor
DEALLOCATE rowCursor
