Object-oriented technology has made it easier for a software developer to design data objects that model the structure and the behavior of real-world entities, such as multimedia files, XML documents, currency, and geospatial applications. Functionality and data can be encapsulated within an object making it a discrete, self-contained entity that can be queried to reveal information about its content and provides a set of methods that operate on that content. Historically, it has been a nontrivial effort for a database administrator to design and implement database applications that emulate real-world objects or processes using the common structures and data types available in a relational database.

Teradata Database now facilitates this object-oriented approach by supporting User-defined Types.