A standard mechanism for directly accessing unstructured data types (e.g., image, audio, video, gene sequencing and text data) in accordance with data mining operations is provided. The subject innovation can enable access to unstructured data directly from within the data mining engine or tool. Accordingly, the innovation enables multiple vendors to provide algorithms for mining unstructured data on a data mining platform (e.g., an SQL-brand server), thereby increasing adoption. As well, the subject innovation allows users to directly mine unstructured data that is not fixed-length, without pre-processing and tokenizing the data external to the data mining engine. In accordance therewith, the innovation can provide a mechanism to expand declarative language content types to include an "unstructured" data type thereby enabling a user and/or application to affirmatively designate mining data as an unstructured type.