Performance of using cursor PLSQL

Question

I have to get a count using a cursor. the basic cursor is

get *
from table

In here there are three types of data I want to get the count of.

sysdate < start_date
sysdate > startdate and sysdate < enddate
sysdate > enddate

I have 2 ways of doing this.

1. Loop the above cursor and use a if condition to get the counts.

2. Create 3 separate cursors with the conditions and directly get the count

As I have a lot of data what way would be good in perspective of performance ?

Answer 1

3. Don't use a cursor at all.

Use conditional aggregation. That's almost surely faster than any cursor based approach.

SELECT count(CASE
               WHEN sysdate < start_date THEN
                 1
             END) count1,
       count(CASE
               WHEN sysdate > startdate
                    AND sysdate < enddate THEN
                 1
             END) count2,
       count(CASE
               WHEN sysdate > enddate THEN
                 1
             END) count3
       FROM elbat;