Issue with FETCH CURSOR

Question

Dear All,
In one of the standard program the following code is used
FETCH NEXT CURSOR c_handle-db_cursor
        INTO CORRESPONDING FIELDS OF l_s_ce0_enh.
Here the problem is sometimes at this line program getting timed out and gives dump as time limit exceeded.l_s_ce0_enh is workarea.
Please let me know the solution for this.
Regards
Shoban

Answer 1

In 10g,
FOR r IN c LOOPis optimized by the compiler into a bulk-fetch operation, whereas
OPEN c;
LOOP
    FETCH c INTO r;
    EXIT WHEN c%NOTFOUND;
    etc...is not.
If your analysis shows that fetching from the cursor is where most of the time goes, it's possible the query itself needs optimising. Or it could be that it just has a lot of rows to work on and it's performing the best it can.
However, the whole cursor loop approach is inherently slower than a single SQL statement, so depending on what processing you need to perform inside the loop it may be possible to replace the whole thing with one INSERT or MERGE etc. Or as others have suggested you might explicitly bulk collect a couple of hundred rows at a time into a collection, and apply your INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE etc processing in FORALL statements using the collection.