When built-in types or ANSI-compliant types are insufficient, OceanBase Database provides SQL-based interfaces for defining new types. The behavior of these types can be implemented in C/C++, Java, or PL/SQL. This topic focuses on the Any types provided by OceanBase Database.
OceanBase Database provides infrastructure services for input/output operations, heterogeneous client access to new data types, and data transmission optimization between applications and the database.
These interfaces can be used to build user-defined (or object) types, and OceanBase Database can also use these interfaces to create some commonly used data types.
The current version of OceanBase Database provides the Any type for flexible modeling of procedure parameters. These data types allow you to dynamically encapsulate and access the type descriptions, data instances, and data instance sets of any other SQL type. The PL/SQL interfaces of the Any type provide construction and access functionality.
The current version of OceanBase Database supports the following two Any types:
ANYTYPE
This type can contain the type descriptions of any named SQL type or unnamed transient type.
ANYDATA
This type contains instances, data, and descriptions of the specified type. These values can be SQL built-in types or user-defined types.