Cursors and ISAMs

Before you proceed, you must understand something crucial about using cursors: You should never let cursors turn SQL Server into a network ISAM.

You might recall from Chapter 1 that the initial grand plan for SQL Server called for it to be a higher performance back end for Ashton-Tate's dBASE IV. dBASE was really a record-oriented, ISAM-like data management system (that is, it did sequential, row-by-row processing). It was not set based. At the time, SQL Server didn't use cursors, which made a difficult task even more difficult. The original plan to make the two record-oriented and set-based systems totally compatible and seamlessly interchangeable was doomed from the outset because of inherent differences in the models. If the original SQL Server had featured the rich cursor model it has now, cursors would have been heavily used to build the dBASE IV front end from the start. But it was probably better that the impedance mismatch became obvious. It forced the SQL Server development team to reexamine its basic goals and dramatically improve its plans. It also highlighted the importance of orienting oneself to work with sets of data, not individual records as one would do with an ISAM. Had cursors existed then, they probably would have been misused, with the result being a bad SQL Server front end.

Cursors can be an important tool when used prudently. However, because cursors are record oriented, developers who are familiar with ISAM systems (such as IMS, dBASE, VSAM, or the Microsoft Jet database engine used in Microsoft Access) are often tempted to use cursors to port an application from an ISAM system to SQL Server. Such a port can be done quickly, but this is also one of the fastest ways to produce a truly bad SQL Server application. In the basic cursor example shown previously, the operation to fetch each row of the authors table is much like an ISAM operation on the authors file. Using that cursor is an order of magnitude less efficient than simply using a single SELECT statement to get all authors. This type of cursor misuse is more common than you'd think. If you need to port an ISAM application to SQL Server, do a deep port that is, go back and look at the basic design of the application and the data structures before you do the port. A shallow port making SQL Server mimic an ISAMis appropriate only if you're one of those programmers who believes that there's never time to do the port right but there's always time to do it over.

For example, even a modestly experienced SQL Server programmer who wants to show authors and their corresponding book titles would write a single SELECT statement similar to the one below that joins the appropriate tables. This SELECT statement is likely to yield subsecond response time even if all the tables are large, assuming that appropriate indexes exist on the tables.

 SELECT A.au_id, au_lname, title FROM authors A  JOIN titleauthor TA ON (A.au_id=TA.au_id) JOIN titles T ON (T.title_id=TA.title_id) ORDER BY A.au_id, title 
NOTE
When we refer to response time, we mean the time it takes to begin sending results back to the client applicationin other words, how long it takes until the first row is returned.

In the example above, all the join processing is done at the back end and a single result set is returned. Minimal conversation occurs between the client application and the serveronly the single request is received and all the qualifying rows are returned as one result set. SQL Server decides on the most efficient order in which to work with the tables and returns a single result set to satisfy the request.

An ISAM programmer who doesn't know about an operation such as a join would approach this problem by opening the authors "file" (as an ISAM programmer would think of it) and then iterating for each author by scanning the titleauthor "connecting file." This programmer would then traverse into the titles file to retrieve the appropriate records. So rather than write the simple and efficient SQL join described above, the programmer might see cursors as the natural solution and write the code shown below. This solution works in a sense: it produces the correct results. But it is truly horrific in terms of its relative complexity to write and its performance compared to the set-based join operation. The join would be more than 100 times faster than this query.

 DECLARE @au_id char(11), @au_lname varchar(40), @title_id char(6),     @au_id2 char(11), @title_id2 char(6), @title varchar(80) DECLARE au_cursor CURSOR FOR     SELECT au_id, au_lname FROM authors ORDER BY au_id DECLARE au_titles CURSOR FOR     SELECT au_id, title_id FROM titleauthor ORDER BY au_id DECLARE titles_cursor CURSOR FOR     SELECT title_id, title FROM titles ORDER BY title OPEN au_cursor  FETCH NEXT FROM au_cursor INTO @au_id, @au_lname WHILE (@@FETCH_STATUS=0)     BEGIN     OPEN au_titles     FETCH NEXT FROM au_titles INTO @au_id2, @title_id     WHILE (@@FETCH_STATUS=0)         BEGIN         -- If this is for the current author, get         -- titles too         IF (@au_id=@au_id2)             BEGIN             OPEN titles_cursor             FETCH NEXT FROM titles_cursor INTO                 @title_id2, @title             WHILE (@@FETCH_STATUS=0)                 BEGIN                 -- If right title_id, display the values                 IF (@title_id=@title_id2)                     SELECT @au_id, @au_lname, @title                 FETCH NEXT FROM titles_cursor INTO                     @title_id2, @title                 END                 CLOSE titles_cursor             END         FETCH NEXT FROM au_titles INTO @au_id2, @title_id         END     CLOSE au_titles     FETCH NEXT FROM au_cursor INTO @au_id,@au_lname     END CLOSE au_cursor DEALLOCATE titles_cursor DEALLOCATE au_titles DEALLOCATE au_cursor 

Although this cursor solution is technically correct and is similar to the way ISAM processing would be written, if your developers are writing SQL Server applications like this stop them immediately and educate them. It might be easy for a developer who is familiar with SQL to see that the join is much better, but a developer who is steeped in ISAM operations might see the cursor solution as more straightforward even though it is more verbose. This is much more than just a style issue. Even for this trivial example from pubs with only 25 rows of output, the join solution is orders of magnitude faster. SQL Server is designed for set operations, so whenever possible you should perform set operations instead of sequential row-by-row operations. In addition to the huge performance gain, join operations are simpler to write and are far less likely to introduce a bug.

Programmers familiar with the ISAM model do positioned updates. That is, they seek (or position) to a specific row, modify it, seek to another row, update it, and so forth. Cursors also offer positioned updates, but performance is far slower than what you can achieve using a single UPDATE statement that simultaneously affects multiple rows. Although the previous example showed a SELECT operation, you can also accomplish updates and deletes using subquery and join operations. (For details, see Chapter 8.)

Problems with ISAM-Style Applications

The main problems with the ISAM style of writing applications for SQL Server are as follows :

  • The ISAM-style operation makes excessive requests to the SQL Server. When cursor operations are done in the client application, a huge increase in network traffic results. In the join solution example we just examined, one request was made to the server: the SQL query doing the join. But in ISAM-style code, if every OPEN and FETCH presents a command to the server, this simple example that produces fewer than 30 rows of output results in more than 1000 commands being sent to the SQL Server!
  • For the sake of illustration, the procedure is written entirely with Transact -SQL cursors. But cursors are typically written from a client application, and every OPEN and every FETCH would indeed be a separate command and a separate network conversation. The number of commands grows large because of all the nested iteration that happens with the series of inner loops , as you'll see if you trace through the commands. Although this procedure is admittedly convoluted, it's not unlike ones that exist in real applications.

  • It is almost always more expensive to use a cursor than it is to use set-oriented SQL to accomplish a given task. ISAM's only form of update is the positioned update, but this requires at least two round-trips to the serverone to position on the row and another to change it. In set-oriented SQL, the client application tells the server that it wants to update the set of records that meet specified criteria. Then the server figures out how to accomplish the update as a single unit of work. When you use a cursor, the client doesn't allow the server to manage retrieving and updating records.
  • In addition, using a cursor implies that the server is maintaining client "state" informationsuch as the user 's current result set at the server, usually in tempdb as well as consumption of memory for the cursor itself. Maintaining this state unnecessarily for a large number of clients is a waste of server resources. A better strategy for using SQL Server (or any server resource in fact) is for the client application to get a request in and out as quickly as possible, minimizing the client state at the server between requests. Set-oriented SQL supports this strategy, which makes it ideal for the client/server model.

  • The ISAM-style application example uses a conversational style of communicating with the server, which often involves many network round-trips within the scope of a single transaction. The effect is that transactions take longer. Transactions handled in this way can require seconds or minutes between the BEGIN TRANSACTION and COMMIT TRANSACTION statements. These long-running transactions might work fine for a single user, but they scale much too poorly for multiple users if any update activity occurs.
  • To support transactional consistency, the database must hold locks on shared resources from the time the resources are first acquired within the transaction until the commit time. Other users must wait to access the same resources. If one user holds these locks longer, that user will affect other users more and increase the possibility of a deadlock. (For more on locking, see Chapter 13.)

SEE ALSO
See Peter Hussey's whitepaper titled "Designing Efficient Applications for Microsoft SQL Server" to learn about programming interfaces that can be used for SQL Server development. It also covers such issues as appropriate uses for cursors. A copy of this document is included on the book's companion CD. You can also download it for free from http://www.microsoft.com/sql.


Inside Microsoft SQL Server 7.0
Inside Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 (Mps)
ISBN: 0735605173
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1999
Pages: 144

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