I am also very interesting in this very question.. Is there any way to declare a persistant cursor that remains open between pg sessions?
Not sure how this would work. What do you do with multiple connections? Only one can access the cursor, so which should it be?
This would be better than a temp table because you would not have to do the initial select and insert into a fresh table and incur those IO costs, which are often very heavy, and the reason why one would want to use a cursor.
I'm pretty sure two things mean there's less difference than you might expect:
1. Temp tables don't fsync
2. A cursor will spill to disk beyond a certain size
-- Richard Huxton Archonet Ltd
---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
