Records

ou can use the %ROWTYPE attribute to declare a record that represents a row in a table or a row fetched from a cursor. But, with a user-defined record, you can declare fields of your own.

Records contain uniquely named fields, which can have different datatypes. Suppose you have various data about an employee such as name, salary, and hire date. These items are dissimilar in type but logically related. A record containing a field for each item lets you treat the data as a logical unit.

Consider the following example:

DECLARE
TYPE TimeRec IS RECORD (hours SMALLINT, minutes SMALLINT);
TYPE MeetingTyp IS RECORD (
date_held DATE,
duration TimeRec, — nested record
location VARCHAR2(20),
purpose VARCHAR2(50));

Notice that you can nest records. That is, a record can be a component of another record.