Cursors provide access to individual rows of a result table. A result table is a temporary collection of columns and rows from one or more tables or views. For cursors, the result table is specified by the select expression in the DECLARE CURSOR statement. Unlike other result tables, the result table for a cursor can exist throughout execution of more than one statement. Host language programs require cursors because programs must perform operations one row at a time, and therefore can execute statements more than once to process an entire result table. You name the result table for a cursor in the DECLARE CURSOR statement and refer to that name in OPEN, CLOSE, FETCH, UPDATE, and DELETE statements. You cannot qualify cursor names.