MySQL® Crash Course

Chapter 24. Using Cursors

In this chapter, you’ll learn what cursors are and how to use them.

Understanding Cursors

Note

Requires MySQL 5. Support for cursors was added to MySQL 5. As such, this chapter is applicable to MySQL 5 or later only.

As you have seen in previous chapters, MySQL retrieval operations work with sets of rows known as result sets. The rows returned are all the rows that match a SQL statement—zero or more of them. Using simple SELECT statements, there is no way to get the first row, the next row, or the previous 10 rows, for example. Nor is there an easy way to process all rows, one at a time (as opposed to all of them in a batch).

Sometimes there is a need to step through rows forward or backward and one or more at a time. This ...