You might have heard "don't use cursors, they are slow!". In this presentation, you will learn what this actually means: you should normally write set-based statements instead and I will explain why they generally are faster than writing your own loops. But I will also look at situations where using a loop for one reason or another is preferable, and you will learn that the best way to run a loop in most cases is exactly a cursor, provided that you implement it properly. The presentation also gives some tips how you can troubleshoot performance problems with loops.