Dave's Notebook

SQL WHILE - SQL For Programmers

SQL For Programmers

The IF statement we looked at on Tuesday was pretty tame compared to the WHILE construct. Actually, the main thing you need to keep in mind is that WHILE is all you have.  There is no such thing as a FOR loop or a DO WHILE loop.  So, you have to force WHILE to do those for you. The basic syntax of WHILE looks like this:

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DECLARE @someString as VARCHAR
WHILE @someString='ABC' BEGIN
   SELECT * FROM someTABLE
   SELECT * FROM someOtherTABLE
  END

So if you want a FOR/NEXT loop, you’ll need to write:

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DECLARE @someInt as int
SET @someInt = 0
WHILE @someInt < 20
  BEGIN /* useful code here */ SET @someInt = @someInt + 1
  END

and a DO WHILE loop would be something like:

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DECLARE @someInt as int
SET @someInt = 0
WHILE @someInt = 0
  BEGIN /* useful code here */ IF /*some exit condition */ SET @someInt = 1
  END

Once you learn to substitute those constructs for your normal FOR/NET or DO WHILE code, it becomes rather easy to deal with. Now if they’d just replace BEGIN with { and END with } I think I could live with this.

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