XML Data Management: Native XML and XML-Enabled Database Systems

6.3. XMLType

Since XML documents can be considered a new structured data type in object-relational databases, new advantages arise, which are discussed in Klettke and Meyer (2000), Banerjee et al. (2000), and Cheng and Xu (2000a) in general.

6.3.1. Object Type XMLType

Oracle9i follows this approach and introduces a new object type XMLType. The main purpose of XMLType is to encapsulate the CLOB storage and to provide XPath-based methods to ease the handling of XML documents. XMLType can be used like any other Oracle type in tables. XMLType provides several methods for processing XML documents:

• STATIC createXML(xml VARCHAR | CLOB)

• MEMBER getClobVal() RETURN CLOB

• MEMBER getStringVal() RETURN VARCHAR

• MEMBER getNumberVal() RETURN NUMBER

• MEMBER isFragment() ...