How can I define a type in oracle11g that references a collection of that type?

Question

I want to do something like this

create type Item as object (
    id number,
    subitems table of ref Item
)

but oracle throws an exceptio

Answer 1

That would be nice wouldn't it! You could try this:

create type item_ids_t is table of number;

create type Item as object (
   id number,
   subitems item_ids_t);

Which means that subitems is just a list of ids, which would then be used to look up a table indexed by id.