Usually when you see a single fetch from a cursor, they're worried about the the NOTFOUND case. So after the fetch, you might see some action based on the notfound case. I guess you can't do this in oracle without using a cursor. For postgresql, you can replace this with select into followed by a if NOT FOUND then ... statement to get equivalent functionality. If not found is not the issue here, you can also just convert it to a simple select.