The lowest level of information that ADOdb supports is the MetaType. This object represents the type of field in a consistent, simplified format.

Data is stored in the database in fields that best represent the type of data, e.g. Integer, character, floating point. These types may be subclassed further, e.g Small,Medium,Large integers. In addition, there may be estoric field types such as geometry, points etc. ADOdb refers to these types as Actual Types.

In total, ADOdb knows about 150 different Actual data types, and can simplify them down to 9 MetaTypes.