Connor McDonald offered a handy reminder of the ability to declare cursors at the package level in his Public / private cursors blog post. I offer this follow-on to make sure you are aware of the use cases for doing this, and also the different behavior you will see for package-level cursors. Generally, first of all, let's remind ourselves of the difference between items declared at the package level ("global") and those declared within subprograms of the package ("local"). Items declared locally are automatically cleaned up ("closed" and memory released) when the block terminates. Items declared globally are kept "open" (memory allocated, state preserved) until the session terminates. Here's are two LiveSQL scripts that demonstrates the difference for a numeric and string variable (not that the types matter). Global vs Local variable (community contribution) Global (Package-level) vs Local (Declared in block) Variables ...
For the last twenty years, I have managed to transform an obsession with PL/SQL into a paying job. How cool is that?