In what case would the use of a T-SQL GOTO statement be acceptable?

Question

In a "religious" discussion about formatting of Microsoft T-SQL code, I questioned whether or not the GOTO statement was still available in T-SQL syntax. In 13 years of using T-SQL I have never had occasion to use it, and indeed didn't know if it existed. After a brief search of the documentation and to my consternation it does indeed exist!

My question is this:

Is there at least one case where GOTO statements would yield a solution that performs better than one in which other higher order programming constructs are used?

• Encryption algorithm implementation

My question is NOT:

• How do I use small bits of functionality without creating a whole function to do so?
• How do I replicate error handling functionality without copy/paste?

Answer 1

I almost never use GOTO and can easily live without it.

The one case where I would consider using it is when I have complicated code that does lots of error checking. I might want to take some action when an error returns, and GOTO allows me to define a single block of code for the error checking.

You can solve this problem in multiple ways, but GOTO is a reasonable option that guarantees that errors are processed consistently and the code is not cluttered with a lot of if @Error = 0 . . . statements.

Answer 2

i saw goto a few times in large scripts where people used it to improve readability. sometimes it is better readable but mostly it turns into spaghetti code.

i see just one situation where goto can maybe perform better. its inside a multiple while loop. you can use goto once instead of multiple breaks which just exists the innermost loop. nevertheless in my opinion break is not much better than goto, its both not a good programming style.

while ...
  while ...
    while... 
    break
  break
break


while ...
  while ...
    while... 
    goto endloops

endloops: