Long Running Cursor

Hi Everyone,
I'm new to SQL so apologies if my question is simple but I'm struggling with how best to complete the task I have.
I have a record set for customer policies with a start and end date (they may last several years), I want to create a table with the policykey and a start and end date for each year between the start and end date of the policy.
I have used the below code to create the table but it runs for over 2 hours. For info there are approx 360,000 records in the initial select so over a million should be generated in the final table.
DECLARE @Date datetime
DECLARE @ENDDATE datetime
DECLARE @POLICYKEY varchar(50)

DECLARE c1 CURSOR READ_ONLY
FOR
SELECT table1.policy_key,table1.POL_START_DATE ,table1.dateadd(yy,1,POL_END_DATE)
FROM table1 INNER JOIN table2.FACT_POLICY_SUMMARY
ON table1.POLICY_KEY = table2.POLICY_KEY
OPEN c1
FETCH NEXT FROM c1
INTO @POLICYKEY, @DATE, @ENDDATE
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
exec SP_POLICY_YEARS @POLICYKEY, @DATE, @ENDDATE
-- PRINT @POLICYKEY + CAST(@ENDDATE AS VARCHAR(50))-- + @DATE
FETCH NEXT FROM c1
INTO @POLICYKEY,@DATE,@ENDDATE
END
CLOSE c1
DEALLOCATE c1
The SP just inserts the record into the new table.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Kind Regards.
Simon

SP details below
***************************
insert into POLICY_YEARS VALUES(@POLICYKEY,
DATEADD(day, DATEDIFF(day, '20000101', @DATE), '20000101'),
DATEADD(day, DATEDIFF(day, '20000101', DATEADD(DAY,-1,(dateadd(year,1,@Date)))), '20000101'))
WHILE (@Date < @ENDDATE)
BEGIN
BEGIN
SET @Date = dateadd(year,1,@Date)
END
IF(@Date > @ENDDATE)
BREAK
ELSE
insert into POLICY_YEARS VALUES(@POLICYKEY,
dATEADD(day, DATEDIFF(day, '20000101', @DATE), '20000101'),
dATEADD(day, DATEDIFF(day, '20000101', DATEADD(DAY,-1,(dateadd(year,1,@Date)))), '20000101'))
CONTINUE
END
****************************
Thanks

At a 10,000 foot level..... why did you chose to do this via a cursor? Cursors are notoriously inefficient and my quick review of your code did not highlight a "need" for a cursor. Rewrite this as a SELECT (you can CASE the @date, @ENDDATE stuff) and then see what the execution time is.
Paul

Thanks for the info, but I'm still not sure of the solution.
How would I rewrite this as a Select?
I have the table generated for the start and end of the policies, these are not just the start and end of each year, they could be any date in the year. I then want to keep adding one year to the start date and creating a new record until that policy gets part the end date at which point I will move on to the next policy.
Source table
Policy Start End
1 15/02/2006 31/09/2008
Destination Table
Policy Start End
1 15/02/2006 14/02/2007
1 15/02/2007 14/02/2008
1 15/02/2008 15/02/2009
Regards.
Simon

Yes, but why would you want to have records to identify each year covered by an existing policy? You only need a record per-year-of-coverage if you need to record specific details per-year-of-coverage --- which you don't.
You can simply check if a given date is between the Start and End dates of the main policy record, like this:
SELECT * FROM policies
WHERE StartDate <= @my_check_date AND EndDate >= @my_check_date

Im suggesting a better practice. Do not use cursors whatever may be the requirement. Cursors create overheads while execution and they are usually slow. Use Correlated subqueries, WHILE loop etc instead of Cursors.

If I understand correctly, you want to create records with Jan 1 and Dec 31 of all years the policy spans. You can use a table of year numbers to help.
The [master].dbo.spt_values table is good for number sequences up to 2047, if that doesn't work for you then create your own table of year numbers. This should run in much less than two hours.
SELECT policy_key,
CASE WHEN d.[Year] = Y1 THEN p.POL_START_DATE ELSE DATEADD(YEAR, d.[Year]-1900,0) END AS StartDate,
CASE WHEN d.[Year] = Y2 THEN p.POL_END_DATE ELSE DATEADD(YEAR, d.[Year]-1899,0)-1 END AS EndDate
FROM (
SELECT table1.policy_key, table1.POL_START_DATE , DATEADD(yy,1,POL_END_DATE) AS POL_END_DATE
YEAR(POL_START_DATE) AS Y1, YEAR(POL_END_DATE)+1 AS Y2
FROM table1
INNER JOIN FACT_POLICY_SUMMARY table2
ON table1.POLICY_KEY = table2.POLICY_KEY
) p
INNER JOIN (
SELECT number AS [Year] FROM [master].dbo.spt_values WHERE number BETWEEN 1900 AND 2047 AND [type] = 'P'
) d ON d.[Year] BETWEEN Y1 AND Y2

scott2718281828 thanks for your approach, it worked a treat other than for leap years so I've had to union a second statement for any on the 29th Feb as we were losing a day.
Thanks again.
Simon