>I'm going to do something I seldom would do... I'm going to appologise for my agressive stance here. I'll send you a personal reply later. From this point on I'm going to be purely technical and try to avoid emotion (if I can handle that) as much as possible.

Wow! That's the last thing I ever expected to see from you. It takes a big man to step up and apologize. Your post was also well done and thoughtful. Congratulations. I think I'll bury the hatchet, because underneath all that blustering there is a decent human being.

That aside, I did a project about 2 years ago in SQL server using Cursors and Record Oriented processing to migrate data from one database scheme to another, which involved translating and updating primary keys and foreign keys in multiple child tables. I spent a couple of weeks writing the routines which when completed and run on main database took 77 hours to complete.

I went back, rethought the process and then produced a complete set-oriented approach which when done, took less than 45 minutes to do the same thing. Its my experience, that set oriented will always outperform record-oreiented processing given the horsepower on the server to accomplish it.