Cursors help you manipulate the information retrieved by select statements. This can be done by assigning a name to the cursor.

Example:

CURSOR emp_cur 

IS 

SELECT emp_number from employee_tbl where employee_name = name_in;

Types of Cursors:

Implicit cursors- These cursors are not declared by the programmer. They are issued when the SQL statement is executed. The open, close and fetching is done by itself.

Example:

UPDATE employee SET salary = salary * 2.1;

Here, an implicit cursor is issued to identify the set of rows in the table which would be affected by the update.

Explicit cursors- These cursors are defined by programmer. They are used in queries that return multiple rows.

Example:

CURSOR emp_cur 

IS 

SELECT emp_number from employee_tbl where employee_name = name_in;