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Cursors & Bulk Operations

Explain explicit cursors in PL/SQL — OPEN, FETCH, CLOSE

Explicit Cursors

Oracle Fusion / EBS · Technical · PL/SQL

GeneralHigh confidence

A named, private SQL work area you OPEN, FETCH from row by row, and CLOSE explicitly.

Grounded in: Curated Oracle knowledge layer — PL/SQL

How it works

An explicit cursor is a named, private SQL work area you declare, OPEN, FETCH from one row at a time into variables or a record, and CLOSE when done — used when you need row-by-row control that an implicit cursor (a bare SELECT INTO) or a cursor FOR loop don't give you. %NOTFOUND after a FETCH is the standard loop-exit check, since FETCH doesn't raise an exception when there's nothing left to read.

How it works
DECLARE
  CURSOR c_high_earners IS
    SELECT employee_id, last_name, salary FROM employees WHERE salary > 10000;
  v_employee_id employees.employee_id%TYPE;
  v_last_name   employees.last_name%TYPE;
  v_salary      employees.salary%TYPE;
BEGIN
  OPEN c_high_earners;
  LOOP
    FETCH c_high_earners INTO v_employee_id, v_last_name, v_salary;
    EXIT WHEN c_high_earners%NOTFOUND;
    DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(v_last_name || ': ' || v_salary);
  END LOOP;
  CLOSE c_high_earners;
END;
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