MOVE(7)

💅 MOVE(7) — the cursor glow-up 🎀

okay so bestie, welcome to MOVE(7) from the PostgreSQL 16.15 documentation. This is the page for positioning a cursor, and it's lowkey giving “I don’t fetch rows, I just set the vibe.” ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

MOVE - position a cursor 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

MOVE [ direction ] [ FROM | IN ] cursor_name

where direction can be one of:

• NEXT
• PRIOR
• FIRST
• LAST
• ABSOLUTE count
• RELATIVE count
• count
• ALL
• FORWARD
• FORWARD count
• FORWARD ALL
• BACKWARD
• BACKWARD count
• BACKWARD ALL

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so MOVE repositions a cursor without retrieving any data. That’s the whole main-character move: the cursor gets moved, and no rows come back. 💅

MOVE works exactly like the FETCH command, except it only positions the cursor and does not return rows. It’s literally FETCH’s sibling with the row-returning part turned off. ✨

The parameters for the MOVE command are identical to those of the FETCH command. So for the full tea on syntax and usage, refer to FETCH(7) — iykyk. 🫶

💖 OUTPUTS 💖

On successful completion, a MOVE command returns a command tag of the form:

MOVE count

The count is the number of rows that a FETCH command with the same parameters would have returned (possibly zero). So yes, bestie, zero is a valid count — no crumbs returned, but still valid. 💀

🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

okay, here’s the example from the page, copied exactly so you can see the whole cursor situation:

BEGIN WORK;
DECLARE liahona CURSOR FOR SELECT * FROM films;

-- Skip the first 5 rows:
MOVE FORWARD 5 IN liahona;
MOVE 5

-- Fetch the 6th row from the cursor liahona:
FETCH 1 FROM liahona;
 code  | title  | did | date_prod  |  kind  |  len
-------+--------+-----+------------+--------+-------
 P_303 | 48 Hrs | 103 | 1982-10-22 | Action | 01:37
(1 row)

-- Close the cursor liahona and end the transaction:
CLOSE liahona;
COMMIT WORK;

⭐ COMPATIBILITY ⭐

no cap: there is no MOVE statement in the SQL standard. That’s the compatibility tea, periodt. 💅

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• CLOSE(7)
• DECLARE(7)
• FETCH(7)

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💖 That’s the MOVE(7) vibe! This page is from PostgreSQL 16.15, dated 2026 — mwah, bye bestie! 💅✨