[DB-SIG] Scrollable cursors

[Christopher Petrilli]

M.-A. Lemburg [mal@lemburg.com] wrote:
> > It doesn't, yet. I have heard they are coming soon, though, in 3.23.
> 
> Wow, now that would be *cool*.

My understanding is it will be "optional" on a per-table (or database)
level.  This is cool, but I'm going to bet that when turned on they're
down to the same speed as say PostgreSQL.  Transactions are expensive,
but a necessary thing in a lot of applicatons.  

> Hmm, reminds me of many postings on the MyODBC list... MySQL
> doesn't support server side cursors and your findings probably
> relate to this defficiency.
> 
> OTOH, client side cursors don't help much w/r to performance
> and reduction of network bandwidth... perhaps you should
> wait until MySQL has server side cursors ?!

Client Side cursors are effectively pointless.  Most of the time you
use cursors for reducing memory footprint as well.  If you have a table
that you need to operate on that has 1M rows, you don't want to have
to suck all of them back in at once...in Oracle for example, you can
controll the cursor bblock-size.  This is very helpful.

Chris
-- 
| Christopher Petrilli
| petrilli@amber.org