Built-in and user-defined routines

One of the most straight-forward ways of categorizing routines is to divide them into built-in routines and user-defined routines.

Built-in routines are routines that are provided with the product. These routines provide a wide variety of support for tasks ranging from administrative functions to database system and catalog reporting. They are immediately ready-to-use and require no prerequisite setup or registration steps, although users require the necessary privileges to invoke these routines.

User-defined routines are routines that users create themselves. User-defined routines provide a means for users to extend the SQL language beyond the support which is currently available. User-defined routines can be implemented in a variety of ways which include sourcing (re-using the logic of) built-in routines, using SQL statements only, or using SQL with another programming language.