This chapter discusses performance issues related to cursors. Cursors are a mechanism for accessing the results of a SQL select statement one row at a time (or several rows, if you use set cursors rows). Since cursors use a different model from ordinary set-oriented SQL, the way cursors use memory and hold locks has performance implications for your applications. In particular, cursor performance issues includes locking at the page and at the table level, network resources, and overhead of processing instructions.
