Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 DBA Survival Guide, Second Edition

Creating a Cursor

Every cursor must have at least four components. The four key components must follow this order:

1.	DECLARE the cursor
2.	OPEN the cursor
3.	FETCH from the cursor
4.	CLOSE or DEALLOCATE the cursor

Step 1: DECLARE the Cursor

The DECLARE statement contains the user-defined name used to reference the resultset, as well as the SQL SELECT statement that generates the resultset. Think of the DECLARE statement as a temporary table that contains a pointer to your actual data source.

DECLARE Cursor Syntax

The following is the SQL-92 cursor syntax:

DECLARE cursor_name [INSENSITIVE] [SCROLL] CURSOR 
FOR select_statement
[FOR {READ ONLY | UPDATE [OF column_list]}]

The following is the cursor extension syntax. (Note: The syntax that ...