Patent ID: 7539688

Claim:
A system comprising: at least one processor; computing memory communicatively coupled to the processor, the computing memory operable to store and retrieve at least one user-defined type defined by a class created by managed code, the class comprising information for describing a structure of said at least one user-defined type, and information for describing an inheritance relationship between said at least one user-defined type and a second user-defined type, wherein the inheritance relationship of the second user-defined type to the at least one user-defined type is at least one of a subtype or a supertype of said at least one user-defined type; a database stored in said computing memory with an extensible type system, the class created by the managed code that defines the at least one user-defined type is compiled into an assembly that is explicitly registered with the database such that the user-defined type acts as a scalar type within a structured query language (SQL) language type system, the explicit registration indicating the inheritance relationship between said at least one user-defined type and said second user-defined type.