Explicit Cursors

The set of rows returned by the query can include zero, one, or multiple rows, depending on how many rows meet your search criteria. Whenever a query returns a multiple row, you can explicitly declare the cursor to process the rows. Furthermore, you can declare a cursor in the declarative part of any PL/SQL subprogram, block, or package.

You use 3 commands to control the cursor: OPEN, FETCH, & CLOSE. At First, you initialize the cursor with the OPEN statement that identifies the result set. Then, you use the FETCH statement to recover the first row. You can execute FETCH frequently until all rows have been retrieved. When the final row has been processed, you discharge the cursor with the CLOSE statement. You can process few queries in parallel by declaring and opening the multiple cursors.