In cursor processing, ADABAS supports more than the usual FETCH logic which runs sequentially through the SELECT result once. In addition to FETCH NEXT as default, FETCH PREV, FETCH FIRST, FETCH LAST, FETCH POS, and FETCH SAME are also supported. It is thus possible to run through the same SELECT result several times and, above all, to formulate easily and directly a backward scrolling in results. Anyone who has tried to program this backward scrolling with the usual means available in other SQL systems will be thankful for this facility.
There are positioned accesses not only within SELECT results. Also when accessing individual rows of a table with a primary key definition, ADABAS supports the SELECT variants SELECT NEXT, SELECT PREV, SELECT FIRST, SELECT LAST, and SELECT DIRECT. The specification of direction refers to the primary key order. In this way, application programming based on the primary key order is supported more directly and more efficiently than would be possible using the usual SQL constructs (ORDER BY).