PostgreSQL, Second Edition

Cursors

Direct cursor support is new in PL/pgSQL version 7.2. Processing a result set using a cursor is similar to processing a result set using a FOR loop, but cursors offer a few distinct advantages that you'll see in a moment.

You can think of a cursor as a name for a result set. You must declare a cursor variable just as you declare any other variable. The following code snippet shows how you might declare a cursor variable:

...
DECLARE
  rental_cursor      CURSOR FOR SELECT * FROM rentals;
...

rental_cursor is declared to be a cursor for the result set of the query SELECT * FROM rentals. When you declare a variable of type CURSOR, you must include a query. The cursor variable is said to be bound to this query, and the variable is a bound cursor ...