Server Cursors

The ODBC SQL Server driver automatically uses the server cursors (static, keyset, and dynamic) that were implemented in SQL Server 6.0. This results in improved performance, cleaner cursor semantics (compared to the cursor library in earlier versions), and more efficient memory usage at the client. Server cursors are not used in the following cases:

• The user sets ODBC_CURSORS to SQL_CUR_USE_ODBC.
• The user declares the cursor to be forward-only, read-only, rowset = 1.
• The user declares the cursor to be static and updatable.

One key benefit of using server cursors is that you can have multiple active statements (several open cursors) on the same connection. For more information about using server cursors with ODBC functions, see Chapter 7, ODBC Cursors.