Any SQL programmer with some experience knows that loops are bad and that you should work with all data at once in set-based statements. However, you may have experienced situations where this strategy did not work out well and you ran into problems like out-growing the transaction log or blocking other users. You can solve this by operating on the data in chunks. Implementing chunking is not that difficult, but there are still pitfalls you can run into. In this session, I will discuss in what situations you may want to use chunking. I will give some best practices for how to implement chunking for good performance and I will highlight some things you need to keep in mind, for instance, recovering from interruptions. I will also look at how you can use chunking for error handling: You want process many rows and you want the good rows to succeed even if some rows yield errors – something you cannot do in a single set-based statement.

This is a level 300/400 session for persons who have been working with
T-SQL development for a few years.