Oracle Spatial and Graph, formerly Oracle Spatial, is a free option component of the

Oracle Database Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a proprietary multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. It is a database commonly used for ru ...

. The spatial features in Oracle Spatial and Graph aid users in managing geographic and location-data in a native type within an Oracle database, potentially supporting a wide range of applications — from automated mapping,

facilities management Facility management or facilities management (FM) is a professional discipline focused on coordinating the use of space, infrastructure, people, and organization. Facilities management ensures that physical assets and environments are managed effe ...

, and

geographic information systems A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data. Much of this often happens within a spatial database; however, this is not ...

( AM/FM/GIS), to wireless location services and location-enabled

e-business Electronic business (also known as online business or e-business) is any kind of business or commercial activity that includes sharing information across the internet. Commerce constitutes the exchange of products and services between businesses, ...

. The graph features in Oracle Spatial and Graph include Oracle Network Data Model (NDM) graphs used in traditional network applications in major

transportation Transport (in British English) or transportation (in American English) is the intentional Motion, movement of humans, animals, and cargo, goods from one location to another. Mode of transport, Modes of transport include aviation, air, land tr ...

, telcos, utilities and energy organizations and RDF semantic graphs used in

social network A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of Dyad (sociology), dyadic ties, and other Social relation, social interactions between actors. The social network per ...

s and social interactions and in linking disparate data sets to address requirements from the research, health sciences, finance, media and intelligence communities.

Components

The geospatial feature of Oracle Spatial and Graph provides a

SQL Structured Query Language (SQL) (pronounced ''S-Q-L''; or alternatively as "sequel") is a domain-specific language used to manage data, especially in a relational database management system (RDBMS). It is particularly useful in handling s ...

schema Schema may refer to: Science and technology * SCHEMA (bioinformatics), an algorithm used in protein engineering * Schema (genetic algorithms), a set of programs or bit strings that have some genotypic similarity * Schema.org, a web markup vocab ...

and functions that facilitate the storage, retrieval, update, and query of collections of spatial features in an Oracle database. (The spatial component of a spatial feature consists of the

geometric Geometry (; ) is a branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. Geometry is, along with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. A mathematician w ...

representation of its shape in some

coordinate space In mathematics and physics, a vector space (also called a linear space) is a set (mathematics), set whose elements, often called vector (mathematics and physics), ''vectors'', can be added together and multiplied ("scaled") by numbers called sc ...

— referred to as its "geometry".)

Geospatial data features

The Oracle Spatial geospatial data features consist of: * a schema - MDSYS (as in "multi-dimensional system") - that prescribes the storage, syntax, and semantics of supported

data type In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a collection or grouping of data values, usually specified by a set of possible values, a set of allowed operations on these values, and/or a representation of these ...

s * a spatial indexing system * operators, functions, and procedures for performing area-of-interest queries, spatial join queries, and other

spatial analysis Spatial analysis is any of the formal Scientific technique, techniques which study entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties, primarily used in Urban design, Urban Design. Spatial analysis includes a variety of techni ...

operations * functions and procedures for utility and tuning operations * vector performance acceleration for substantially faster querying and more efficient use of CPU, memory, and partitioning * support for parametric curves (

NURBS Non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) is a mathematical model using basis splines (B-splines) that is commonly used in computer graphics for representing curves and surfaces. It offers great flexibility and precision for handling both analy ...

) for mathematically precise representation of free-form curves that can be reproduced exactly for 2D and 3D data * a

topology Topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a Mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformat ...

data model A data model is an abstract model that organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to one another and to the properties of real-world entities. For instance, a data model may specify that the data element representing a car be ...

for working with data about

node In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics * Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph *Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, lines ...

edge Edge or EDGE may refer to: Technology Computing * Edge computing, a network load-balancing system * Edge device, an entry point to a computer network * Adobe Edge, a graphical development application * Microsoft Edge, a web browser developed by ...

s, and

face The face is the front of the head that features the eyes, nose and mouth, and through which animals express many of their emotions. The face is crucial for human identity, and damage such as scarring or developmental deformities may affect th ...

s in a

* a GeoRaster feature to store, index, query, analyze, and deliver GeoRaster data (

raster image upright=1, The Smiley, smiley face in the top left corner is a raster image. When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares. Enlarging further, each pixel can be analyzed, with their colors constructed through combination of the values for ...

and gridded data and its associated

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

) with virtual mosaics, raster-algebra operations, image processing, Java API, and GDAL-Based ETL Wizard * 3-dimensional data-types and operators including Triangulated Irregular Networks (TINs), Point Clouds and

LiDAR Lidar (, also LIDAR, an acronym of "light detection and ranging" or "laser imaging, detection, and ranging") is a method for determining ranging, ranges by targeting an object or a surface with a laser and measuring the time for the reflected li ...

data sets with Spatial R-tree indexing, SQL operators and analysis functions, and metadata for visualization *

geocoding Address geocoding, or simply geocoding, is the process of taking a text-based description of a location, such as an address or the name of a place, and returning geographic coordinates, frequently latitude/longitude pair, to identify a locati ...

that converts location and address data into formal geographic coordinates from point addresses and address ranges, and supports reverse geocoding * a

routing Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a Network theory, network or between or across multiple networks. Broadly, routing is performed in many types of networks, including circuit-switched networks, such as the public switched ...

engine that creates fastest or shortest routes with driving distances, times, directions and turn-specific geometries based on commercial and publicly available street network data, and restrictions and conditions for advanced routing, such as truck-specific routing *

Open Geospatial Consortium The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international voluntary consensus standards organization that develops and maintains international standards for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web, Internet of Things, Geographi ...

-compliant

Web Service A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

s for geocoding, routing, mapping, business-directory, catalog, and geospatial feature transactions *Spatial Visualization components to render data on maps.

Network Data Model

The

Network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

Data Model feature is a property graph model used to model and analyze physical and logical networks used in industries such as transportation, logistics, and utilities. Its features include: * Persistent management of the network connectivity in the database * A data model for representing capabilities or objects (modeled as

s and links) in a network with a PL/SQL API for managing network data. * User-determined link and node properties, such as costs and restrictions, including temporal properties. * Association of real world objects with network elements to simplify application development and maintenance. * A Java API for in-memory network path analytics, including shortest path, nearest neighbors, within cost, and reachability, with partitioned loading of large networks into memory.

RDF semantic

The RDF

Semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

Graph feature supports the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) RDF standards. It provides RDF data management, querying and inferencing that are commonly used in a variety of applications ranging from semantic

data integration Data integration refers to the process of combining, sharing, or synchronizing data from multiple sources to provide users with a unified view. There are a wide range of possible applications for data integration, from commercial (such as when a ...

social network analysis Social network analysis (SNA) is the process of investigating social structures through the use of networks and graph theory. It characterizes networked structures in terms of ''nodes'' (individual actors, people, or things within the network) ...

and linked open data applications. Its features include: * An RDF triple store and

ontology Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...

management with automatic partitioning and data compression. * Proven scalability to over 54 billion

triples TripleS (; ; stylized as tripleS) is a South Korean 24-member multinational girl group formed by Modhaus. They aim to be the world's first decentralized idol group, where the members will rotate between the full group, sub-units, and solo activi ...

(LUBM 200K benchmark) with scalability to the 8 petabyte limit of Oracle Database. * High performance bulk loading with Oracle Database parallel and direct path loading and loading through Jena. * SPARQL and SQL parallel querying and updating of RDF graphs with

SPARQL SPARQL (pronounced ":wikt:sparkle, sparkle", a recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) is an RDF query language—that is, a Semantic Query, semantic query language for databases—able to retrieve and manipulate data sto ...

1.1, SPARQL endpoint web services, SPARQL/Update, Java APIs with open source Apache Jena & Sesame, SQL queries with embedded SPARQL graph patterns, SQL insert/update. * Ontology-assisted querying of table data using SQL operators to expand SQL relational queries with related terms for more comprehensive results. * Native inferencing with parallel, incremental and secure operation for scalable reasoning with RDFS,

Web Ontology Language The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of Knowledge representation and reasoning, knowledge representation languages for authoring Ontology (information science), ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe Taxonomy, taxonomies and ...

(OWL 2 RL/EL),

Simple Knowledge Organization System Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C recommendation designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is part of t ...

(SKOS), user-defined rules, user-defined inference extensions, and an extensibility framework to plug-in special purpose reasoners, such as PelletDB, TrOWL. * GeoSPARQL support for storing / querying spatial data in RDF per Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC) specification. * RDF views on relational data to apply semantic analysis with support for automatic (Direct Mapping) and custom (W3C R2RML language) mapping of relational data to

RDF triple A semantic triple, or RDF triple or simply triple, is the atomic data entity in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model. As its name indicates, a triple is a tuple, sequence of three entities that codifies a statement (programming), sta ...

s. * Triple-level security that meets the most stringent security requirements with Oracle Label Security. * Integration with open source Apache Jena and Sesame application development environments. * Integration with XML-based tools, such as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) for reporting and dashboards. * Integration with Network Data Model graph analytics for shortest path, nearest neighbors, within cost, and reachability. * Integration with Oracle Advanced Analytics features: Oracle Data Mining for exploiting

predictive analytics Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of Statistics, statistical techniques from data mining, Predictive modelling, predictive modeling, and machine learning that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or other ...

and pattern discovery and Oracle R Enterprise for statistical computing and charting visualization of graph data. * Semantic indexing for

text mining Text mining, text data mining (TDM) or text analytics is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extracting information from differe ...

and entity analytics integrated with popular natural language processors. * Integration with leading commercial and open source tools for querying, visualization, and ontology management.

Availability

Oracle Spatial and Graph is an option for Oracle Enterprise Edition, and must be licensed separately. Free since December 5, 2019. It is also included in Oracle Database Cloud Service (High Performance Edition and Extreme Performance Edition). It is not included in Oracle Standard Edition or Oracle Standard Edition One. However, the latter two editions allow the use of a subset of spatial features (called ''Oracle Locator'' ) at no extra cost. An appendix of the ''Oracle Spatial and Graph Developer's Guide'' specifies the functions allowed in Locator.

History

The Oracle RDBMS first incorporated spatial-data capability with a modification to Oracle 4 made by scientists working with the

Canadian Hydrographic Service ''Retired Canadian Hydrographic Service logo or crest'' The Canadian Hydrographic Service (CHS) is part of the federal department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada and is Canada's authoritative hydrographic office. The CHS represents Canada in ...

(CHS). A joint development team of CHS and Oracle personnel subsequently redesigned the Oracle kernel, resulting in the "Spatial Data Option" or "SDO" for Oracle 7. (The SDO_ prefix continues in use within Oracle Spatial implementations.) The spatial indexing system for SDO involved an adaptation of

Riemann Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (; ; 17September 182620July 1866) was a German mathematician who made profound contributions to analysis, number theory, and differential geometry. In the field of real analysis, he is mostly known for the first ...

ian

hypercube In geometry, a hypercube is an ''n''-dimensional analogue of a square ( ) and a cube ( ); the special case for is known as a ''tesseract''. It is a closed, compact, convex figure whose 1- skeleton consists of groups of opposite parallel l ...

data-structures, invoking a helical spiral through 3-dimensional space, which allows n-size of features. This also permitted a highly efficient compression of the resulting data, suitable for the

petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

-size data repositories that CHS and other major corporate users required, and also improving search and retrieval times. The "helical hyperspatial code", or

HHCode A Helical Hyperspatial Code, also known as an HHCode, is a data storage format for very large spatio-temporal datasets. The development of HHCode can be traced to efforts in the 1990's by Edric Keighan, Panagiotis A. Vretanos, Michael Galluchon, ...

, as developed by CHS and implemented by Oracle Spatial, comprises a form of

space-filling curve In mathematical analysis, a space-filling curve is a curve whose Range of a function, range reaches every point in a higher dimensional region, typically the unit square (or more generally an ''n''-dimensional unit hypercube). Because Giuseppe Pea ...

. With Oracle 8,

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

marketing dubbed the spatial extension simply "Oracle Spatial". The primary spatial indexing system no longer uses the

, but a standard

r-tree R-trees are tree data structures used for spatial access methods, i.e., for indexing multi-dimensional information such as geographical coordinates, rectangles or polygons. The R-tree was proposed by Antonin Guttman in 1984 and has found s ...

index. Since July, 2012, the option has been named Oracle Spatial and Graph to highlight the graph database capabilities in the product - Network Data Model graph introduced with Oracle Database 10g Release 1 and RDF Semantic Graph introduced with Oracle Database 10g Release 2.

References

Oracle Documentation Library https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/oraclecertificationenvironment-docs-library.html See: * Spatial and Graph Developer's Guide * Spatial and Graph GeoRaster Developer's Guide * Spatial and Graph Topology Data Model and Network Data Model Graph Developer's Guide * Spatial and Graph Java API Reference (Javadoc) * Spatial and Graph RDF Semantic Graph Developer's Guide

Notes

{{reflist

External links

*http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database-options/spatialandgraph/overview/index.html – Oracle Corporation's official website * http://fdo.osgeo.org/fdooracle/index.html – Open Source FDO interface to Oracle Spatial data Oracle software GIS software Graph databases Spatial database management systems