What are the steps involved to use a CURSOR in any COBOL-DB2 program?

The CURSOR is used when we have to fetch multiple rows from a table. There are 4 steps involved in order to use a cursor in a COBOL-DB2 program.

• DECLARE cursor− In this step we will define the layout of the cursor. We will give the query we want to use. For example−

EXEC SQL
DECLARE ORDER_CUR CURSOR FOR
SELECT ORDER_ID FROM ORDERS
WHERE ORDER_DATE = ‘2020-07-28’
END-EXEC

• OPEN cursor− Next we will open our cursor. This statement readies the cursor for data retrieval. For example−

EXEC SQL
OPEN ORDER_CUR
END-EXEC

• FETCH cursor− In this statement, we start fetching the data from DB2 and the row data is stored in host variables. The syntax is like below.

EXEC SQL
FETCH ORDER_CUR INTO :ORDER-ID
END-EXEC

• CLOSE cursor− In this last step we close the cursor which will release all the resources held by the cursor.

EXEC SQL
CLOSE ORDER_CUR
END-EXEC