In part 5 of my series on the bin packing problem, I presented a method that sits somewhere in between the true row-by-row iterative characteristics of the first three parts and the truly set-based approach of the fourth part. I did use iteration, but each pass through the loop would use a set-based statement to process a lot of rows at once. Since that statement is fairly complex, I am sure that a single execution of it is far from cheap – but the algorithm used is efficient enough that the entire...(read more)