Cursors could be used in some applications for serialized operations as shown in example above, but generally they should be avoided because they bring a negative impact on performance, especially when operating on a large sets of data.

Why cursor should not be used?

Cursors are used to fetch single rows from the result set returned by a query and allow the row-by-row iteration through the result set, whereas set based processing can be much faster. Cursors can also cause transactional problems because of the run time.

When should you use a cursor?

Use of Cursor

The major function of a cursor is to retrieve data, one row at a time, from a result set, unlike the SQL commands which operate on all the rows in the result set at one time. Cursors are used when the user needs to update records in a singleton fashion or in a row by row manner, in a database table.