I'm trying to understand what this block of code means. What does the TABLE mean?

FROM index_policy e,
**TABLE** (policies) p,
**TABLE** (p.plan_indexes) i
WHERE i.default_strategy IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY e.extract_id DESC,
e.cycle_date DESC,
contract_number,
acc_code;

Thanks

CodePudding user response：

TABLE is the syntax for a table collection expression.

Which is defined in the documentation as:

table_collection_expression

The table_collection_expression lets you inform Oracle that the value of collection_expression should be treated as a table for purposes of query and DML operations. The collection_expression can be a subquery, a column, a function, or a collection constructor. Regardless of its form, it must return a collection value—that is, a value whose type is nested table or varray. This process of extracting the elements of a collection is called collection unnesting.