What is cursor

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Most read guides. What is Android? What is a PC? See more guides ». Newest guides. Cursors are an extension to result sets that provide that mechanism. A cursor is implemented by a cursor library. A cursor library is software, often implemented as a part of a database system or a data access API, that is used to manage attributes of data returned from a data source a result set. These attributes include concurrency management, position in the result set, number of rows returned, and whether you can move forward or backward or both through the result set scrollability.

A cursor keeps track of the position in the result set, and allows you to perform multiple operations row by row against a result set, with or without returning to the original table. In other words, cursors conceptually return a result set based on tables within the databases. The cursor is so named because it indicates the current position in the result set, just as the cursor on a computer screen indicates current position.

It is important to become familiar with the concept of cursors before moving on to learn the specifics of their usage in ADO. For example, consider an application that displays a list of available products to a potential buyer. The buyer scrolls through the list to see product details and cost, and finally selects a product for purchase. Additional scrolling and selection occurs for the remainder of the list. As far as the buyer is concerned, the products appear one at a time, but the application uses a scrollable cursor to browse up and down through the result set.

Sensitive to underlying table changes caused by other applications such as membership, sort, inserts, updates, and deletes. Complex cursors can be defined with keysets that point back to base table rows. While loading a webpage requested by the user or while the system is launching the requested application, the cursor changes into hourglass image or some other "waiting" indicator.

Users are allowed to customize the cursor in most operating systems. The speed of the cursor also can be controlled in most operating systems. When a cursor moves to a text editor or a word processing application, it turns into a text cursor. By: Justin Stoltzfus Contributor, Reviewer. By: Satish Balakrishnan. Dictionary Dictionary Term of the Day. High-Performance Cloud Computing. Techopedia Terms.