Eric Russell 13013 (9/17/2010)
Most Oracle developers love cursors. I mean, it's so obvious they're in love. If you read an Oracle PL/SQL developer guide, it will be full of sappy love poetry dedicated to the art of writing cursors.
This is a tricky one.
It might be true that some developers love cursors - probably developers with strong mainframe procedural programming languages background. Cursors usually allow for a direct translation of poorly defined business rules.
On the other hand, cursors force row-based processing which usually performs horrible. Best practice is to design back-end code to take advantage of set-based data processing; avoiding this way the use of cursors.
Last but not least, cursors are a powerfull tool but it has to be used when needed rather than relying on cursors as the preferred development approach.
Just remember Rule #5 which states that DBA are responsible for Database performance then, your job as a DBA is to be sure no unnecesary use of cursors makes it to production environment. In most serious Oracle shops DBA still have the power to validate/improve/reject bad code.
Hope this clarifies a bit.
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Pablo (Paul) Berzukov
Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.
Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.