Prompted by a daily ''SQL Tip'' email a few days ago that recommended the correlated subquery to solve the cumulative total problem, this 5 minute screencast (5:02) demonstrates that the cursor solution indeed out-scales the set-based correlated subquery for this particular problem.

I found Linchi's recent post on use of cursors in the TPC-E test to be quite interesting. The question is, why are cursors used in the test when the commonly accepted notion within the SQL Server community is that cursors are a bad thing? I've posted in the past about situations where cursors were actually faster than set-based queries. But in ...