Actually i am not highly Impressed by this Answere.

I read your site every business day. Often I learn something valuable. I especially like your demonstrative examples. BTW, Love your book.

While your preprocessor example works, it doesn't elegantly handle associating named check constraints to your predefined type. If you change the type, it would probably break the constraint.

If I have a "name" column defined in 20 tables, I sure would love to make sure that they are all the same type (for example - varchar2(char 64)). While Object types can meet this need, they provide an extra level of indirection. It seems like this can become cumbersome if there are multiple object types within a single table.

Many E/R tools support derived types, which is a beautiful
thing. But the problem is one has to rely on this tool for all schema changes, which can be extremely limiting.

How would you go about solving this problem?

Do you consider object types a valid solution to standardize a type for a single column?

I could use grep compare types between like named columns, but god forbid someone chooses a non-standard naming convention for a given column.

Just looking for a robust solution.

Also, is there any way I can provide feedback to the product manager's that this is a desired feature (in my book anways)?

Thanks for all your help.

Hi Tom,

After reading this, am I right that there is not way (yet) in Oracle to create a synonym or alias for another datatype such as date?

What I want to achieve is to create a "datetime" type which is the same as "date".

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