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Lawson Speaks about Oracle Object Types

In this excellent article by Chris Lawson, author of the bestselling “The Art and Science of Oracle Performance Tuning”, we see a great summary of Oracle object types:

http://www.oraclemagician.com/mag/magic5.pdf

Chris Lawson not only defines what an Oracle object type is, but gives us an easy to understand example:

     In order to illustrate object types, let’s model the business of apartment rentals. We’ll assume that the manager of the  apartment building, having just returned from an Oracle class, wants to model his business in an object-oriented fashion using Oracle’s object types. Let’s begin by creating a new object type for the person who rents an apartment:

     Create or replace type Renter AS OBJECT (
     First_Name Varchar2(30),
     Middle_Name Varchar2(30),
     Last_Name Varchar2(30),
     Drivers_License Varchar2(20),
     Phone Varchar2(10));
     /

Lawson also shows us how to make data persistent with object tables:

     One easy way to store data using our object types is to build a new object called an Object Table. An object table is a table that matches a certain object type.

Lawson concludes the article with this note:

     With these examples, we have only touched on the basics of Oracle object types. There are many more features available—some of them truly bewildering in their complexity. You will probably run into Oracle object types soon, so you might as well get used to them!