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Looping with WHILE(TRUE)

Eitan Blumin won’t be getting off this bus:

This is one of those things that I would have never expected to adopt, and yet here I am! Not just loving “infinite” loops, but also confident enough that I can convince you to feel the same!

It may sound very weird to most people at first, since it’s such an unorthodox way of using WHILE loops, and probably goes against what you consider to be coding best practices and standards.

I use this a fair amount as well for the reasons Eitan describes. The one thing to keep an eye out for, though, is that you are actually progressing toward an end goal. In other words, if you’re using WHILE(TRUE) to loop through batches of rows in a table by, say, minimum ID, make sure you increment that minimum ID or else you’ll be spinning your wheels for a while and not realize it. Not that I’ve ever done that before, of course…