[marcosdumay]

I imagine none of you or the GP is talking about in-database cursors, that you open in SQL, use on the same SQL script, close at the end of the script and move along. There isn't really a problem inherent to those, and they stay non-problematic if you are writing your database scripts on Python, C, or whatever.

For a server reading and writing from/on a database, you paginate your queries. On Postgres that would be using "limit" and doing small bulk inserts, but under Oracle your options for inserting are limited, so there is still value on cursors.

There is the odd occasion where you'll will iterate through the entire results set, do something fast for each and every row, and only get something useful on the end. Those are classic problems where cursors are more efficient than the alternatives. But even on those, once you add error handling and recovering may yield better results with pagination.