Advantages of opaque data types

Both an opaque data type and a row data type allow you to define members of the data type. The advantages of creating an opaque data type rather than a row data type are as follows.
  • The opaque data type is more compact to store.

    The opaque data type does not have the overhead in the system catalog that a row data type requires.

  • The opaque data type is more efficient.

    The support functions of an opaque data type manipulate the internal structure of the opaque data type directly. You do not need to take special steps (DataBlade® API calls or SQL dot notation) to extract data from the members as you must do for the fields of a row data type.