Help with traversing a HUGE table

First I apologize if this is a basic question. This is all fairly new to me.

I am attempting to extract data from a table with 6 million plus records. With each record I qury several other tables and then submit to a new table. It works great when I select the top record. My problem is that I need to traverse the entire table.

I use cursors in other parts of the script but think that trying to use a cursor on a 6 million record table is a little stupid.

Does anyone have some advice on a different way?

Thanks in advance!

SGlauner

If you have'nt already check out these and some other links on www.sql-server-performance.com - its quite helpful.

http://sql-server-performance.com/cursors.asp
http://sql-server-performance.com/transact_sql.asp

In most cases you should try to avoid using cursor - try replacing it with a set based operation.

I'd suggest before you submit to the new table, make sure you drop the indexes before your inserts/updates and recreate them at the end - that way you save SQL server the overhead to check referential integrity constraints.