Suspending SELECTs

I am aware that what I am dreaming of is already available through cursors, but
in a web application, cursors are bad boys, and should be avoided. What I would
like to be able to do is to plan a query and run the plan to retreive a limited
number of rows as well as the executor's state. This way, the burden of
maintaining the cursor "on hold", between activations of the web resource which
uses it, is transferred from the DBMS to the web application server, and, most
importantly, the responsibility for garbage-collecting stale cursors is
implicitely delegated to the garbage-collector of active user sessions. Without
this mechanism, we are left with two equally unpleasant solutions: first, any
time a user instantiates a new session, a new cursor would have to be declared
for all relevant queries, and an ad-hoc garbage collection daemon would have to
be written to periodically scan the database for stale cursors to be closed;
otherwise, instead of using cursors, the web application could resort to
OFFSET-LIMIT queries--no garbage collection issues but pathetic performance and
server-load.

Do we have any way out?

Alex

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