A few days ago a project that I was working on required me to loop through a result set from a select statement.  Most examples used database cursors. However, I came across an old article that shows an alternative method for doing this. 

Let’s pretend that we had a scenario that we want to loop over the rows in this table and print the fishinglicense.  We can do this without using a database cursor. Here is some code to ponder on

DECLARE @fishingLicense VARCHAR(50)
DECLARE @id INT
DECLARE @rowNum INT
DECLARE @maxrows INT

SELECT TOP 1 @id = DuckstickUserID,
             @fishingLicense = FishingLicense
FROM   DuckstickUser

SELECT @maxRows = COUNT(*)
FROM   DuckstickUser 

SET @rowNum = 0 
-- Loop until last row is reached
WHILE @rowNum < @maxRows
  BEGIN
      SET @rowNum = @rowNum + 1

      -- this is where you can now do something to the record
      PRINT( 'Processing user: ' + @fishingLicense )

      -- now we grab the next row making sure the ID of the next row
      -- is greater than previous row
      SELECT TOP 1 @id = DuckstickUserID,
                   @fishingLicense = FishingLicense
      FROM   duckstickuser
      WHERE  DuckstickUserID > @id
  END 

This can be very useful when you need to iterate items in a table.