How to avoid duplicated FETCH in T-SQL when using a cursor?

Question

In T-SQL, when iterating results from a cursor, it seems to be common practice to repeat the FETCH statement before the WHILE loop. The below example from Microsoft:

DECLARE Employee_Cursor CURSOR FOR
SELECT EmployeeID, Title FROM AdventureWorks2012.HumanResources.Employee
    WHERE JobTitle = 'Marketing Specialist';
OPEN Employee_Cursor;

FETCH NEXT FROM Employee_Cursor;
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
    BEGIN
        FETCH NEXT FROM Employee_Cursor;
    END;
CLOSE Employee_Cursor;
DEALLOCATE Employee_Cursor;
GO

(Notice how FETCH NEXT FROM Employee_Cursor; appears twice.)

If the FETCH selects into a long list of variables, then we have a large duplicated statement which is both ugly and of course, "non-DRY" code.

I'm not aware of a post-condition control-of-flow T-SQL statement so it seems I'd have to resort to a WHILE(TRUE) and then BREAK when @@FETCH_STATUS is not zero. This feels clunky to me.

What other options do I have?

Answer 1

There's a good structure posted online by Chris Oldwood which does it quite elegantly:

DECLARE @done bit = 0 

WHILE (@done = 0)  
BEGIN 
  -- Get the next author.  
  FETCH NEXT FROM authors_cursor  
  INTO @au_id, @au_fname, @au_lname  

  IF (@@FETCH_STATUS <> 0) 
  BEGIN 
    SET @done = 1 
    CONTINUE 
  END 

  -- 
  -- stuff done here with inner cursor elided 
  -- 
END