A practical use of a numbers table.
Thursday, September 11th, 2008Many of you will have heard the mantra that loops are bad, set based is good. But how do you get around them?
The fact of the matter is that there are very few circumstances where a loop is the only way to achieve your objective. A look through the SQL forums will show you many a technique to turn iterative row by row processing into single transaction set based processing. I’m refering to hierarchical query techniques (see nested set theory) and of course the subject of this post, the numbers table.
