Oracle in a Nutshell

Types of records

There are three types of records: table based, cursor based, and programmer defined. You need not explicitly define table-based or cursor-based records, because they are implicitly defined with the same structure as a table or cursor. Variables of these types are declared via the %ROWTYPE attribute. The record’s fields correspond to the table’s columns or the columns in the select list.

On the other hand, programmer-defined records must be explicitly defined with the TYPE statement in the PL/SQL declaration section or in a package specification. Variables of this type can then be declared or used as part of another type:

DECLARE
   TYPE name_rectype IS RECORD(
      prefix       VARCHAR2(15)
      ,first_name  VARCHAR2(30)
      ,middle_name VARCHAR2(30)
      ,sur_name    VARCHAR2(30)
      ,suffix      VARCHAR2(10) );

   -- Declare a variable of this type. 
   new_emp_rec name_rectype;
BEGIN