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Introduction to Cursors
When the Oracle platform processes a SQL or DML statement, it creates an area of memory known as the context area that contains the information necessary to process the statement. This information includes the number of rows processed by the statement, referred to as the active set, and a pointer to the parsed representation of the statement.
In PL/SQL, a cursor is a handle, or pointer, to the context area. A PL/SQL program manages the context area through the cursor. In other words, you can think of a cursor as a container that holds the set of rows returned by a SQL or DML statement.
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