Did he give you a reason why they're absolutely bad? I use cursors all the time and the only time I've run into trouble of any sort is when the Cursor is poorly ...
A common SQL habit is to use SELECT * on a query, because it’s tedious to list all the columns you need. Plus, sometimes those columns may change over time, so why not just do things the easy way? But ...
Everyone wants faster database queries, and both SQL developers and DBAs can turn to many time-tested methods to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, no single method is foolproof or ironclad. But even ...