Why? (I am not taking a contrary position by asking). I'm not really an RDBMS guy (but I can write a select query from scratch!), but IIRC, the Netscape Server

Why? (I am not taking a contrary position by asking). I'm not really an RDBMS guy (but I can write a select query from scratch!), but IIRC, the Netscape Server API (where Javascript got it's start - not in the browser!), there was heavy use of and expectation in the NSAPI of cursors for tabular data table scrolling and the like. I don't recall if they were in the DB or the HTTPD server. But I do know that if you didn't want a 20,000 row response to your query to be HTML-ized to be transmitted and then displayed (sometimes over a 56kbps modem), you used cursors in the NSAPI. I have no idea about whether that was a good design decision at the time, and even less idea now, but I kind of incorporated the practice, and didn't know it was "bad". It is relevant for large web-API end-point responses (pagination) even now, no? So! Why is that bad? :-) EDIT: Please don't be snarky - I spend more time figuring out clock-skew on high-frequency mixed-signal boards than I do talking to a database, and I'd like to learn to be better at the latter.