August 2002
Intermediate to advanced
528 pages
10h 12m
English
Cursor variables are a special PL/SQL type that allows a procedure to return the rows from a cursor to a calling application. This can be useful when you want to switch cursors dynamically, as you will see in Listing 16.1, or to return multiple rows from a procedure. The cursor variable designates an area of memory that stores the returned rows from the procedure.
Two steps are needed to create a cursor variable:
Declare the cursor as a REF CURSOR type.
Define a cursor variable using the type.
Here is a syntax example of the declaration:
Type type_name is ref cursor return return_type; Cursor_variable_name type_name;
The return type can be a data type or a PL/SQL record. When the return data type is included, the cursor variable ...