In our series on the 11g R2 release of the Oracle RDBMS, AMIS staff discusses various functions, features an facilities that have been added, improved or extended in this latest release. These articles are the fruit of several months of studying this new release and projecting which new features and changes would be the most useful to us in our daily practice. This article looks at apparently relatively minor changes in functionality that may well have a substantial impact on the usability of Abstract Data Types (ADTs) or user defined (object) types.

Using ADTs or user defined types in the Oracle RDBMS is quite often very useful. Much more useful by the way than many developers realize. The integration for example between SQL and PL/SQL can be streamlined using user defined types in conjunction with TABLE and MULTISET or the BULK COLLECT operations. Presenting a service-style interface from PL/SQL packages is also much easier realized using custom type definitions – easier both for the definition of the package’s "service contract", the consumer of the package (at least the Database Adapter used in the SOA Suite) and the developers implementing the service contract. Such a More >