Oracle Announces New Features for Oracle Spatial

Oracle Announces New Features for Oracle Spatial at User's Conference
By Joe Francica , Editor-in-Chief and Vice Publisher, Directions MagazineApril 29, 2009

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The fifth annual Oracle Spatial User's Conference was held last weekfollowing the GITA Conference in Tampa, Florida. Jim Steiner, seniordirector of Oracle's Server Technology, opened the conference withremarks about some industry trends and comments on Oracle's recentacquisition of Sun Microsystems. "The data explosion continues," saidSteiner. He cited several important events contributing to thisphenomenon. He included the launch of DigitalGlobe's WorldViewsatellite, with imagery available at approximately .50 cm resolution.He also mentioned Nokia's acquisition of NAVTEQ, which saw the digitaldata provider accelerate the rate of geographies it captures,including more from China, plus data sets for the telecommunicationand transportation industries. Steiner discussed the importance ofuser-generated content that provides a mechanism to acquire data fromusers in near real-time, especially "perishable" data such as trafficinformation. Finally, he noted that sensors went mainstream in 2008,including data captured by location-enabled traffic cameras. "This hada profound effect on the market," said Steiner.

Strategy for Oracle SpatialSteiner said that enhancements to Oracle Spatial will include moreanalysis, modeling and visualization for applications in retail,business intelligence, utilities and other areas. The company plans todo more with the network data model (NMD) and to add robust pathanalysis to support more complex networks. There will be investment insatellite image processing and new georeferencing methods. For themuch longer term, Steiner said, "We are going to see a convergence ofthe physical and virtual world." He believes that there is a comfortand ease that new generations have in working in virtual space. "Thiswill enable commercial applications with more complex spatialdimension," said Steiner. Oracle will continue addressing the emerginggrowth areas of unstructured data to support simulations and provide aplatform for 3D content.

Oracle Buys SUN
How does the acquisition of Sun Microsystems fit into Oracle'sstrategy? Steiner said it enhances the commitment to open standards.He explained that the number one platform for Oracle is Solaris,followed by Linux. Oracle and Sun share many clients. Oracle expectscustomer and partner benefits for both communities, includingincreased R&D investments.
New Oracle Spatial EnhancementsSiva Ravada, director of Software Development, provided details onwhat's coming in the next product release, Oracle 11gR2.
GeoRasterGeoRaster API - Oracle will offer four sample applications to showpeople how to use the GeoRaster API: tools.java, loader.java,viewer.java and exporter.java. With these samples, users can easilydevelop extract, transform and load (ETL) tools and applicationsgeared for Web applications.

Coordinate support for GeoRaster (SDO_GEOR.reproject) - This willallow users to transform GeoRaster raster data from one projection toanother. All Oracle Spatial coordinate systems are supported. Fiveresampling methods are supported: Nearest Neighbor, Bilinear, Cubic,Average4 and Average16.

Polygon-based raster clipping - Blocking size optimizer-minimizepadding - Blocking size optimizer will automatically optimize theblocking size based on the GeoRaster dimension sizes.
Raster InterpolationsTwo new functions - SDO_GEOR.evaluate and SDO_GEOR_evaluate.doubleenable; these functions provide advanced georeferencing using groundcontrol points (GCP).

Extract Transform and Load Functions - The GDAL GeoRaster Driver nowloads natively, importing and exporting many formats to/fromSDO_georaster including GeoTIFF and JPEG2000.

Interior PointSDO_UTIL.INTERIOR_POINT returns SDO_GEOMETRY; SDO_GEOM.SDO_TRIANGULATEreturns a geometry with triangular elements that result from DelaunayTriangulation. These commands provide labeling capabilities requestedby users.
Union of Geometry ObjectsA new method - SDO_AGGR_SET_UNION takes a VARRAY of SDO_GEOMETRYobjects as input and returns the aggregate union of all the geometryobjects in the VARRAY. This is a faster way to create the UNION ofseveral geometry objects. The function is useful when the geometriesto be grouped are easily gathered into a collection.
Faster Coordinate System TransformationSDO_CS.Transform is up to 10 times faster, according to Ravada. NowOracle Spatial uses context between transform() calls with the samesource and target SRIDs; in prior releases the transformation contextwas created for each transform() call.

Cross-endian Support for Transport Tablespace (TTS) and Spatial IndexSDO_UTIL.INITIALIZE_INDEXES_FOR_TTS now automatically fixes the indexif the TTS export is done in a different endian format than the targetformat.

Triangulated Irregular Networks and Point CloudsA result table for SDO_PC is used to map the input points to thePTN_ID and PINT_ID columns. This process has been very slow in thepast; this change enhances SDO_PC (point cloud) AND SDO_TIN storage.

Geocoding Using NAVTEQ DataA new table using NAVTEQ data and the function, GC_ADDRESS_PINT_NVT,provides point geocoding. The NAVTEQ data must reside in the databaseand will have to be purchased from NAVTEQ first.

Web Services
Oracle Spatial will provide full support for database transactions onOpenGIS Web Feature Service (WFS) 1.1 feature tables and WorkspaceManager. Oracle Spatial will allow updates/deletes on WFS-T featuretables via SQL. Users will be able to perform WFS transactions intoworkspace enabled feature tables. Users need sdo_wfs_lock.enableDBtxnsprocedure in a session before any workspace maintenance operation suchas refreshing a workspace or merging workspace can be completed.

Network Data Model (NDM)Path/Subpath analysis will support multiple costs in a singleanalysis. It will be possible to perform shortest distance paths withtravel time and fastest paths with travel distance.
User-defined objects can be accumulated and used in the networkconstraints during network analysis. The NDM now captures changes tothe network made in the database and users can synchronize thesechanges to network partitions in the database and in memory. This canbe done incrementally instead of reading the whole network again fromthe database.

Logical Network Partitioning
A new partitioning utility to help partition logical networks will beavailable to minimize the number of links among network partitions,and perform load balancing with predefined thresholds. This will beparticularly useful to those who work with very large networks.
Traveling Salesman (TSP) AnalysisThe new release will include a minimum cost tour function thatincludes all given nodes and support points on network as the nodesare visited.
Drivetime Polygon GenerationA spatial representation (polygon) can be created against a minimumcost network.

Routing EngineRouting applications will be built on top of the NDM Load-on-Demand(LOD) engine and use all the extensibility of the underlying NDMengine. Truck routing is an example of customizing the route for aspecific application. The new routing engine allows users to specifyvehicle type (car or truck) so that it can assume certain impedancesalong the highway depending on vehicle restrictions (weight, height,axel weight, width, length), allowing users to build a very complexrouting application. Truck routing data from NAVTEQ table definitionswill make a call to the NVT_TRANSPORT table.

Fusion Middleware (FMW)
MapViewerJayant Sharma, technical director for Oracle Spatial said, "[FMW]MapViewer (pdf) is essentially a mashup engine... for local search,map reporting and to some degree, interacting with the application."FMW MapViewer is WebLogic certified, and can provide annotation text,scalable styles, "heatmaps" and secure map rendering. MapViewer nowhas a wrap-around map capability (users had requested this for sometime), a toolbar, floating map "decoration" and tabbed informationwindows. In this development cycle, the objective was to focus onimproving the productivity of the developer who wanted to use it foradding different features. The "heatmaps" function will showconcentrations of points, such as for business locations.
Imagery Handling11g R2 now supports spherical coordinate systems. DigitalGlobe is alsomaking imagery more available to Oracle MapViewer throughjImageConnect, an SDK for its image library that provides access toimagery within Web applications and can be easily embedded in alreadyexisting Web applications.

SummaryEvery year Oracle enhances Oracle Spatial with new support for rasterand vector data analysis and management. This year seems to be anotherjump forward in support of advanced spatial analysis for both


Editor's Note: Oracle presented this information for the first time inpublic to its users at this event. Watch the Oracle website for thepresentations that were given at the users' conference; someinformation is there now with respect to Oracle Spatial 11gfunctionality.