Spatial Database for Geographic Information System (GIS) Applications

This paper explains the concepts of Oracle Spatial as a way to store and analyze spatial data. Oracle Spatial is designed to make spatial data management easier and more natural to users of location-enabled applications and Geographic Information System(GIS) applications. Once spatial data is stored in an Oracle database, it can be easily manipulated, retrieved, and related to all other data stored in the database. The data that indicates the Earth location (such as longitude and latitude) of these rendered objects is the spatial data. When the map is rendered, this spatial data is used to project the locations of the objects on a two-dimensional piece of paper. A GIS is often used to store, retrieve, and render this Earth-relative spatial data. Types of spatial data (other than GIS data) that can be stored using Oracle Spatial include data from Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) systems.