A cursored collection can be used to allow a user to view subsets of a data result set, thereby conserving system resources. A persistence manager can execute SQL statements on a database, receive a result set from the database, and populate a set of EJBs with the result set. This can be a full result set, or a subset of the full result set. A bean manager can allow the user to access all the EJBs or a subset of the EJBs. The bean manager can also provide the user with a list of EJBs and let the client select the EJBs to access. The client can then iterate through the result set, either by viewing different subsets or selecting different EJBs from the list. This iterative process can continue until all the results have been viewed or the client does not wish to access any more results from the set.