In a positioned operation, the current location of the cursor determines where a read or write operation begins.
Sybase IQ supports positioned fetches, which can be helpful in long query transactions. Sybase IQ also supports positioned update and delete operations, which are intended for shorter insertions and deletions. For the most part, updates to IQ databases are likely to involve large amounts of data; repositioning is a very minor part of such write operations.
Positioned updates and deletes are handled as operations on the cursor (and therefore part of its transaction), not as separate statements. Any failure that occurs after the cursor is open results in a rollback of all operations that have been performed through this open cursor.