Before a cursor can be used in an application, it must be declared. The syntax for declaring a cursor is:

The DECLARE CURSOR statement assigns a name to the cursor and associates the cursor with a SELECT statement to use to retrieve data. A cursor is always associated with a particular SELECT statement. The select is executed when the cursor is opened.

Updates can be performed only if the cursor's SELECT statement does not include any of the following elements:

These elements can be present in subselects within the SELECT statement, but must not occur in the outermost SELECT statement.

The cursor_name can be specified using a string literal or a host language string variable. Cursor names can be assigned dynamically. For details, see Example of Dynamically Specified Cursor Names.