A system and method for updating collection-valued and other complex structured columns in a nested table using a nested extension of an UPDATE statement that is analogous to the syntax and semantics of the UPDATE statement that is used to modify scalar-valued columns of the table (called the outer UPDATE). Using the same syntactic and semantic constructs as the table at the outer level allows an existing implementation that processes modifications to relational tables to reuse its implementation techniques for processing outer updates to modify collection-valued columns as well. The UPDATE extensions enable the specification of updates to nested collections embedded at arbitrary levels of depth in the object model. The new syntax is embedded inside the outer UPDATE statement in a way that parallels the structure of the data itself and thus maps more directly to the user's conceptual model of the data.