is it possibl to avoid cursor (returned rows)

Normal set up

cursor
Select ( a bunch of crap..)

Usually I have to use the cursor to go through each record and do more crap with each record, for example I may email each user returned in the select. Is it possible to somehow use a stored procedure instead of a cursor or any other way to make this more efficient?

It's a batch job (run at night) and it'll return about 7,000 rows roughly each time so it's not terrible to the point where i need it to be super efficient, i'd just like to keep as little load on the sql server as much as possible. I assume it's one of those situations where I just can't avoid using the cursor.If your select is simple, you can define a variable to hold the table key(s) and use a while loop to walk through the table.

If your select is complex you could dump the result set of the select into a table and then use a while loop/variable to walk the table.

declare @.au_id varchar(11)
select @.au_id = min(au_id) from pubs.dbo.authors
while @.au_id is not null begin
select * from authors where au_id = @.Au_id
select @.au_id = min(au_id) from pubs.dbo.authors where au_id > @.au_id
end

granted this is simple but it ilistrattes the point