Using Block Cursors
Support for block cursors is built into ODBC 3.x. SQLFetch can be used only for multirow fetches when called in ODBC 3.x; if an ODBC 2.x application calls SQLFetch, it will open only a single-row, forward-only cursor. When an ODBC 3.x application calls SQLFetch in an ODBC 2.x driver, it returns a single row unless the driver supports SQLExtendedFetch. For more information, see Block Cursors, Scrollable Cursors, and Backward Compatibility in Appendix G: Driver Guidelines for Backward Compatibility.
To use block cursors, the application sets the rowset size, binds the rowset buffers (as described in the previous section), optionally sets the SQL_ATTR_ROWS_FETCHED_PTR and SQL_ATTR_ROW_STATUS_PTR statement attributes, and calls SQLFetch or SQLFetchScroll to fetch a block of rows. The application can change the rowset size and bind new rowset buffers (by calling SQLBindCol or specifying a bind offset) even after rows have been fetched.
This section contains the following topics.