Chapter 8 covers manipulating spatial and tabular data. You may want to briefly refamiliarize yourself with “for” and “while” loops before reading this chapter. It would also be wise to familiarize yourself with Structured Query Language (SQL).
Important details to remember:
– Once a script creates an exclusive lock, the lock will continue to exist until the script releases the lock.
Terms
cursor – is a database technology term for accessing a set of records in a table. It works the way list functions work.
search cursor – retrieves rows
insert cursor – inserts rows
update cursor – updates and deletes rows
rows – records in a table
with statements – Good to use when you have two operations that you want to run as a pair
data locks – prevent multiple processes from changing the same table at the same time in two different applications. (includes shared lock and exclusive locks)
shared lock – is applied when a table or dataset is accessed
exclusive lock – are applied when changes are being made to a table or dataset
parsing – splitting the fully qualified name for a dataset into its components
Table 8.1 (pg 248) describes the cursor methods of each class