When discussions about Cursors get hot and heavy, one thing that comes out is that there is a lot of confusions about what a cursor (or "Cursor") really is.  In general a cursor is "a moving placement or pointer that indicates a position."¹  More specifically for databases, a cursor can be formally defined as "a control structure for the successive traversal (and potential processing) of records in a result set."²  Less formally, a cursor is any method (structures and processes) that serializes a data set, that is sequences (imposes an order on) it and then processes it one record at a time, in order, keeping track or the current position with the sequence.

Given that definition, cursors are in a lot more places than we might initially assume and these more general cursors are not what we usually mean when we are talking about the Evils of Cursors.  For that reason, I distinguish betweengeneral "cursors" (lower case) and the explicit user written SQL code constructs called "Cursors".  This naturally raises two important questions;

1. What's so bad about Explicit Cursors?  and,...
2. Are these other cursors OK then?

I will deal with both of these issues in a future post...