Returning number of rows to a REF CURSOR

I believe Oracle is the only major database which uses the REF CURSOR type, so I will assume you are using Oracle. REF CURSORS are used in PL/SQL, Oracles procedural language, so I'll give you an example in a snippet of PL/SQL code.

Cursors in Oracle have attributes, such as %FOUND, %NOTFOUND, %ISOPEN, and %ROWCOUNT. When appended to the name of the cursor, they return useful information about its execution. %ROWCOUNT is the attribute that will give you the information you're looking for. Here is an example:

 declare type tWeakCursor is REF CURSOR; cMyCursor tWeakCursor; vTable_Name varchar2(30); begin open cMyCursor for 'select * from user_tables'; loop fetch cMyCursor into vTable_Name; exit when cMyCursor%notfound; dbms_output.put_line( to_char(cMyCursor%rowcount) || ') ' || vTable_Name ); end loop; close cMyCursor; end;

The %ROWCOUNT attribute returns the current row count of the cursor. After the cursor is opened, %ROWCOUNT is equal to zero. After every successful FETCH, ROWCOUNT is incremented by one.

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