SQL Cursors…Any use cases you would defend?

Question

I\'ll go first.

I\'m 100% in the set-operations camp. But what happens when the set logic on the entire desired input domain leads to a such a large retrieval that

Answer 1

In a pure SQL environment, I'd rather avoid cursors as you suggest. But once you cross over into procedural language (like PL/SQL), there are a number of uses. For example, if you want to retrieve certain rows and want "to do" something more complex than update it with them.