Oracle Spatial

Oracle has support to location enable application. This is called Spatial. It was named Oracle Spatial since Oracle 8. And it is now called Oracle Spatial and Graph since Oracle 10g. Spatial consists of functions and procedures for quick spatial data access and analysis. The code is available in the MDSYS schema.

Spatial defines a number of geometry types:
  • Point
  • Line
  • Polygon
  • Arc
  • Circle
  • Rectangle
Spatial allows you to deal with height and depth data. Or it can represent longitude and lattitude data. This is application to a Geographic Information System (GIS) application. It allows you to project this data onto a two dimensional surface.

The basic building block in Spatial is an element. Types, like mentioned before, are point, line, or polygon. Many elements make up a geometry. And a collection of geometries is a layer.

Spatial allows you to perform an area of interest query. There are two tiers to its query model: (1) primary filter, and (2) secondary filter. To help speed querying, a concept of a spatial index has been created. This is a logical index. There are two types. The first, which is the default, is the R-tree. It uses a minimum bounding box. The second is the quadtree. It uses a technique called tessellation. Each rectangle is chopped into smaller rectangles.