Book Image

Applying and Extending Oracle Spatial

Book Image

Applying and Extending Oracle Spatial

Overview of this book

Spatial applications should be developed in the same way that users develop other database applications: by starting with an integrated data model in which the SDO_GEOMETRY objects are just another attribute describing entities and by using as many of the database features as possible for managing the data. If a task can be done using a database feature like replication, then it should be done using the standard replication technology instead of inventing a new procedure for replicating spatial data. Sometimes solving a business problem using a PL/SQL function can be more powerful, accessible, and easier to use than trying to use external software. Because Oracle Spatial's offerings are standards compliant, this book shows you how Oracle Spatial technology can be used to build cross-vendor database solutions. Applying and Extending Oracle Spatial shows you the clever things that can be done not just with Oracle Spatial on its own, but in combination with other database technologies. This is a great resource book that will convince you to purchase other Oracle technology books on non-spatial specialist technologies because you will finally see that "spatial is not special: it is a small, fun, and clever part of a much larger whole".
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Applying and Extending Oracle Spatial
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Table Comparing Simple Feature Access/SQL and SQL/MM–Spatial
Index

Extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools


Spatial data is usually collected from many different sources, such as proprietary file systems, GIS tools, and third-party vendors. One of the biggest challenges for a database administrator (DBA) is to ingest all of these different formats of data, and present them in a uniform data model to their users. There are specific data loading tools (such as Shapefile, KML, and TAB file converters) to load the data from these specific file formats. In traditional database systems, an ETL tool is used to ingest data from different data sources. Now, there are several graphical user interface (GUI) driven ETL tools (both open source and third-party vendor provided) that can support many of the common spatial data formats. We look at one such ETL tool in detail to see how it can be used for the spatial data loading process.

An ETL tool supports extract, transform, and load operations. During the extract process, the tool can extract data from different source...