Oracle8i: Object-Relational Infrastructure

Oracle has evolved its database to an object-relational engine following the SQL:1999 standard. Oracle's object-relational engine allows you to define object types, collections of types, and references to object types.

This object-relational infrastructure provides the support for storing structured object instances in the database. XML, inherently being a structured data format, can be easily mapped to object-relational instances. This mapping will be discussed in "XML Schemas and Mapping of Documents".