Spatial applications tend to generate large volumes of data, especially as the scale of observation of the world's surface extends to large parts of the Earth's surface. With the increasing data, database models have to adapt to deal with large volumes of spatial data that are not seen in traditional GIS applications. GIS applications expect all the related data in one feature layer, even if the feature layer contains millions of features. Oracle database supports a feature called partitioning that can break large tables at the physical storage level to smaller units while keeping the table as one object at the logical level. In this chapter, we cover the following five topics that are useful for managing large volumes of spatial data:
Introduction to partitioning
Time-based partitioning
Spatial key based partitioning
Implementing space curves based partitioning
High performance loading of the spatial data