Introduction

Significant hardware improvements over the last few years have led the way for the development of extremely complicated applications. In order to create these new sophisticated software systems, which consist of complex objects related by complex relationships, software engineers and developers must rely on logic that is scalable, solid, and reusable (Cáceres, 2002). To fill this need object-oriented programming has emerged as the principal methodology for building systems that meet these requirements. By implementing object-oriented design and programming, large-scale systems are made easier to understand, simpler to debug, and faster to update.
In order to support the object-oriented paradigm that these new applications rely on, Oracle, beginning with Oracle 8 Universal Data Server, started implementing object-oriented principals within the database management system (Oracle, 1997a, p. 2). While implementing objected-oriented functionality, Oracle kept its traditional relational framework as well, thus making it Oracle’s first hybrid database server. This type of database is know as an object-relational database and it contains both relational and object technologies (Hanson, 2002, p. 1).
These object-oriented features are expected to help developers in many different ways. Donald Burleson describes the impact these new object-oriented additions are going to have in a recent article published by TechRepublic,
These additions are anything but mundane. They are going to change the way databases are designed, implemented, and used in ways that Oracle developers have not been able to imagine (Burleson, 2001, p. 1).
According to Oracle, two of the major object-oriented support goals that where realized in the development in the object-relational databases were as follows:
• Provide the ability for users to model business objects in the database by
allowing users to define and use user-defined types.
• Provide infrastructure to support object-based access to object data in
the database while closely matching the data model being used in applications
(Oracle, 1997a, p. 2).
Oracle object types are user-defined data types that allow the modeling of complicated real-world entities into a structure that treats each entity as a single atomic unit in the database.