The purpose of using a cursor, in most cases, is to retrieve the rows from your cursor so that some type of operation can be performed on the data. After declaring and opening your cursor, the next step is to FETCH the rows from your cursor. The basic syntax for a FETCH statement is: FETCH cursor_name INTO <list of variables>; For example, you could have a cursor defined as: CURSOR c1 IS SELECT course_number from courses_tbl where course_name = name_in; The command that would be used to fetch the data from this cursor is: FETCH c1 into cnumber; This would fetch the first course_number into the variable called cnumber; Below is a function that demonstrates how to use the FETCH statement. CREATE OR REPLACE Function FindCourse ( name_in IN varchar2 ) RETURN number IS cnumber number; CURSOR c1 IS SELECT course_number from courses_tbl where course_name = name_in; BEGIN open c1; fetch c1 into cnumber; if c1%notfound then cnumber := 9999; end if; close c1; RETURN cnumber; END;