Re: update statement PL/SQL

Serge Rielau <srielau_at_ca.ibm.com> wrote:

>> Sorry, I may be confused here - am trying to learn PL/SQL. The book
>> Learning Oracle PL/SQL by Bill Pribyl with Steven Feuerstein makes use
>> of cursors - what's so bad about them?

>In a nutshell a cursor is an API that connects the relation model of SQL
>with the procedural model. Whenever you cross models there's an
>impedance mismatch.
>Statistically developers learn procedural concepts first (VB, C, Java,
>..) and have a hard time internalizing relational concepts, so they tend
>to code procedural.
>However RDBMS shine in relational optimization and execution. So using
>an excess of procedural code (resulting in many cursors) is an indicator
>for bad exploitation of the RDBMS.

But Daniel wrote "almost never" - surely there are times when it is necessary to trawl through a result set and modify/process the data in some way. Of course one can do this programatically

Query1.first
while not Query1.end
begin
  processing here;
  Query1.next;
end;

or in a stored proc on the server. I would like to understand why this sort of logic "almost never" applies to Oracle.

Paul...

>Serge

-- 

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