MS SQL 2000 - How to efficiently walk through a set of previous records and process them in groups. Large table

I'd like to consult one thing. I have table in DB. It has 2 columns and looks like this:

Name...bilance

Jane...+3

Jane...-5

Jane...0

Jane...-8

Jane...-2

Paul...-1

Paul...2

Paul....9

Paul...1

...

I have to walk through this table and if I find record with different "name" (than was on previous row) I process all rows with the previous "name". (If I step on the first Paul row I process all Jane rows)

The processing goes like this:

Now I work only with Jane records and walk through them one by one. On each record I stop and compare it with all previous Jane rows one by one.

The task is to sumarize "bilance" column (in the scope of actual person) if they have different signs

Summary:

I loop through this table in 3 levels paralelly (nested loops)

1st level = search for changes of "name" column

2nd level = if change was found, get all rows with previous "name" and walk through them

3rd level = on each row stop and walk through all previous rows with current "name"

Can this be solved only using CURSOR and FETCHING, or is there some smoother solution?

My real table has 30 000 rows and 1500 people and If I do the logic in PHP, it takes long minutes and than timeouts. So I would like to rewri开发者_如何学Cte it to MS SQL 2000 (no other DB is allowed). Are cursors fast solution or is it better to use something else?

Thank you for your opinions.

UPDATE:

There are lots of questions about my "summarization". Problem is a little bit more difficult than I explained. I simplified it just to describe my algorithm.

Each row of my table contains much more columns. The most important is month. That's why there are more rows for each person. Each is for different month.

"Bilances" are "working overtimes" and "arrear hours" of workers. And I need to sumarize + and - bilances to neutralize them using values from previous months. I want to have as many zeroes as possible. All the table must stay as it is, just bilances must be changed to zeroes.

Example:

Row (Jane -5) will be summarized with row (Jane +3). Instead of 3 I will get 0 and instead of -5 I will get -2. Because I used this -5 to reduce +3.

Next row (Jane 0) won't be affected

Next row (Jane -8) can not be used, because all previous bilances are negative

etc.

---

You can sum all the values per name using a single SQL statement:

select
    name,
    sum(bilance) as bilance_sum
from
    my_table
group by
    name
order by
    name

---

On the face of it, it sounds like this should do what you want:

select Name, sum(bilance)
from table
group by Name
order by Name

If not, you might need to elaborate on how the Names are sorted and what you mean by "summarize".

---

I'm not sure what you mean by this line... "The task is to sumarize "bilance" column (in the scope of actual person) if they have different signs".

But, it may be possible to use a group by query to get a lot of what you need.

select name, case when bilance < 0 then 'negative' when bilance >= 0 then 'positive', count(*)
from table
group by name, bilance

That might not be perfect syntax for the case statement, but it should get you really close.