Fetching Across Commits
The FOR UPDATE clauses acquire exclusive all row locks. All rows are locked when you open the cursor, and when you commit your transaction they are unlocked. Therefore, you cannot fetch from a FOR UPDATE cursor after a commit. If you do, the PL/SQL raises an exception. In the illustration below, the cursor FOR loop fails after the tenth insert:
DECLARE
CURSOR c1 IS SELECT ename FROM emp FOR UPDATE OF sal;
ctr NUMBER := 0;
BEGIN
FOR emp_rec IN c1 LOOP -- FETCHes implicitly
...
ctr := ctr + 1;
INSERT INTO temp VALUES (ctr, 'still going');
IF ctr >= 10 THEN
COMMIT; -- releases locks
END IF;
END LOOP;
END;
If you want to fetch across the commits, do not use the FOR UPDATE and CURRENT OF clauses. Rather, use the ROWID pseudocolumn to mimic the CURRENT OF clause.
Merely select the rowid of each row into a UROWID variable. Then, use the rowid to identify the present row during the subsequent updates and deletes. An illustration is as shown:
DECLARE
CURSOR c1 IS SELECT ename, job, rowid FROM emp;
my_ename emp.ename%TYPE;
my_job emp.job%TYPE;
my_rowid UROWID;
BEGIN
OPEN c1;
LOOP
FETCH c1 INTO my_ename, my_job, my_rowid;
EXIT WHEN c1%NOTFOUND;
UPDATE emp SET sal = sal * 1.05 WHERE rowid = my_rowid;
-- this mimics WHERE CURRENT OF c1
COMMIT;
END LOOP;
CLOSE c1;
END;