Hi. This setting is an artifact of a design decision in the old, free MS driver.
If you never need multiple-statement-execution transactions, or you never have
more than one open statement at a time, you can always use direct. Otherwise you
need cursor mode. With direct, if you have multiple statements open at one time,
this old driver creates extra DBMS sessions under-the-covers to process each
statement!
   However, there may be some DBMS tuning you can do to make cursor mode run
faster. Does the table (do the tables) have an appropriate index to make a
row-by-row cursor efficient on the data you want? Are you making your result sets
updateable or scrollable? If you don't have to do that, don't. Plain forward-only
non-updateable result sets are fastest.

Joe Weinstein at BEA