In oracle, do explicit cursors load the entire query result in memory?

I have a table with about 1 billion rows. I'm the sole user so there's no contention on locks, etc. I noticed that when I run something like this:

DECLARE   
  CURSOR cur IS SELECT col FROM table where rownum < N; 
BEGIN
  OPEN cur;
  LOOP
    dbms_output.put_line("blah")
  END LOOP;
  CLOSE cur;
END;

there is a lag between the time when I hit enter and the time the output begins to flow in. If N is small then it's insignificant. For large N (or no WHERE clause) this lag is on the order of hours.

I'm new to oracle as you can tell, and I assumed that cursors just keep a pointer in the table which they update on every iteration of the loop. So I didn't expect a lag proportional to the size of the table over which iteration is performed. Is this wrong? Do cursors load the entire query result prior to iterating over it?

Is there a way to iterate over a table row by row without an initial overhead?

Solution

What you are seeing is that the output from DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE is not displayed until the program has finished. It doesn't tell you anything about how fast the query returned a first row. (I assume you intended to actually fetch data in your example).

There are many ways you can monitor a session, one is like this:

DECLARE   
  CURSOR cur IS SELECT col FROM table; 
  l_col table.col%ROWTYPE;
BEGIN
  OPEN cur;
  LOOP
    FETCH cur INTO l_col;
    EXIT WHEN cur%NOTFOUND;
    dbms_application_info.set_module('TEST',l_col);
  END LOOP;
  CLOSE cur;
END;

While that is running, from another session run:

select action from v$session where module='TEST';

You will see that the value of ACTION keeps changing as the cursor fetches rows.