Illegal cursor state

Reports illegal cursor states inside SQL routines.

A routine has CLOSE or FETCH statements but a cursor might be closed.
A routine has the OPEN statement but a cursor might be opened.

Example (Microsoft SQL Server):

CREATE TABLE t(col INT);

CREATE PROCEDURE foo() AS
BEGIN
DECLARE my_cursor CURSOR FOR SELECT * FROM t;
DECLARE a INT;
FETCH my_cursor INTO a;
CLOSE my_cursor;
END;

According to CLOSE (Transact-SQL) at docs.microsoft.com, CLOSE must be issued on an open cursor, and CLOSE is not allowed on cursors that have only been declared or are already closed. So, we need to open the cursor to fix the warning.

CREATE PROCEDURE foo() AS
BEGIN
DECLARE my_cursor CURSOR FOR SELECT * FROM t;
DECLARE a INT;
OPEN my_cursor;
FETCH my_cursor INTO a;
CLOSE my_cursor;
END;

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

SqlIllegalCursorState

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | SQL

Inspection ID: SqlIllegalCursorStateInspection

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection SqlIllegalCursorState

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	CLion 2025.2, DataGrip 2025.2, DataSpell 2025.2, GoLand 2025.2, IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, JetBrains Rider 2025.2, PhpStorm 2025.2, PyCharm 2025.2, Qodana for .NET 2025.2, Qodana for Go 2025.2, Qodana for JS 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2, Qodana for PHP 2025.2, Qodana for Ruby 2025.2, RubyMine 2025.2, WebStorm 2025.2

Last modified: 18 September 2025