Before using a cursor in an application, the cursor 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 be used to retrieve data. A cursor is always associated with a SELECT statement. The select is executed when the cursor is opened. Updates can be performed only if the cursor SELECT statement refers to a single table (or updatable view) and 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. The cursor name cannot exceed 32 bytes and can be assigned dynamically. For details, see Summary of Cursor Positioning.