Who Said You Cant Do A Loop in SQL

You can sort of do loops in SQL. Its not as nice as in regular programming but you do have a WHILE loop.

All you have to do is this:

WHILE whileCondition
BEGIN
What to do in the loop
END

I had to do some parsing of a string and I had to cycle through each letter to find a particular subset of characters.

There is also FETCH/NEXT but this is much easier

MAKE SURE THAT YOU WILL HIT YOUR WHILE CONDITION OR YOU WILL BE IN AN INFINTE LOOP :)