Cursors allow a client application to retrieve and change data in a powerful, flexible manner. They allow applications to access and move around in a set of data rows, rather than merely retrieve a complete result set.
Moreover, a single connection can have multiple cursors open at the same time. All of the cursor result sets are simultaneously available to the application, which can fetch them at will. This is in direct contrast to other types of result sets, which must be handled one row at a time, in a sequential fashion.
Further, a client application can update underlying database tables while actively fetching rows in a cursor result set.
