According to an IDC News Flash, written by Mr.Sonnen and Mr.Henry Morris, "Oracle 10g's spatial features have, in the past, been the domain of specialized geospatial software.By placing these features in their database environment, Oracle has extended the addressable SIM market to include business intelligence, data warehousing, operational analytics, and many other areas.This new market space is potentially many times larger than the current SIM market." Oracle will be discussing the enhancements at Oracle OpenWorld this week in San Francisco.The Oracle 10g spatial features include:
- Network Data Model - This model explicitly stores and maintains connectivity within networks and provides network analysis capability such as shortest path and connectivity analysis.The network data model also enables Oracle's new Java-based geocoding engine.
- Topology Data Model - This data model and schema persistently store topology in the Oracle database.Persistent topology is a strong requirement for maintaining data integrity across maps and layers.Persistent topology also speeds queries involving relationships among features like adjacency, connectivity, and containment.
- GeoRaster - This new data type manages georeferenced raster imagery (satellite imagery, remotely sensed data).The GeoRaster feature includes an XML schema for managing metadata and for basic operations like pyramiding, tiling and interleaving.
- Spatial Analytic Functions - New spatial analysis capabilities include classification, binning, association and spatial correlation.These capabilities are essential for business intelligence applications and are the foundation of spatially-enabled data mining.
- Geocoder - Geocoding is the process of associating geographic references like address and postal codes with latitude and longitude coordinates. Oracle's geocoding engine is used with 3rd party data for functions like international address standardization and point of interest matching.
For additional details on Oracle Spatial functionality, click here.