Why must a cursor be defined in an open transaction? Obviously there's a good reason, but I can't figure it out. On a high level, what would be involved in allowing a cursor to outlive the transaction that created it?
Historically I think it was because the memory was released at the end of the current transaction (i.e. allocations were made in TopTransactionContext). But as of 7.4, cursors *can* outlive transactions:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/sql-declare.html
WITH HOLD WITHOUT HOLD
WITH HOLD specifies that the cursor may continue to be used after the transaction that created it successfully commits. WITHOUT HOLD specifies that the cursor cannot be used outside of the transaction that created it. If neither WITHOUT HOLD nor WITH HOLD is specified, WITHOUT HOLD is the default.
HTH,
Joe
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