A cursor can’t be used by itself in MySQL. It is an essential component in stored procedures. I would be inclined to treat a cursor as a “pointer” in C/C++, or an iterator in PHP’s foreach statement.

With cursors, we can traverse a dataset and manipulate each record to accomplish certain tasks. When such an operation on a record can also be done in the PHP layer, it saves data transfer amounts as we can just return the processed aggregation/statistical result back to the PHP layer (thus eliminating the select – foreach – manipulation process at the client side).

Since a cursor is implemented in a stored procedure, it has all the benefits (and limitations) of an SP (access control, pre-compiled, hard to debug, etc).

MySQL supports cursors inside stored programs. The syntax is as in embedded SQL. Cursors have these properties:

Asensitive: The server may or may not make a copy of its result table

Read only: Not updatable

Nonscrollable: Can be traversed only in one direction and cannot skip rows

Cursor declarations must appear before handler declarations and after variable and condition declarations.