1.1 What Is Oracle Spatial?

Oracle Spatial, often referred to as Spatial, includes advanced features for spatial data and analysis and for physical, logical, network, and social applications.

The spatial features provide a schema and functions that facilitate the storage, retrieval, update, and query of collections of spatial features in an Oracle database. Spatial consists of the following:

• A schema (MDSYS) that prescribes the storage, syntax, and semantics of supported geometric data types

• A spatial indexing mechanism

• Operators, functions, and procedures for performing area-of-interest queries, spatial join queries, and other spatial analysis operations

• Functions and procedures for utility and tuning operations

• Topology data model for working with data about nodes, edges, and faces in a topology (described in Oracle Spatial Topology and Network Data Model Developer's Guide).

• Network data model for representing capabilities or objects that are modeled as nodes and links (vertices and edges) in a graph (described in Oracle Spatial Topology and Network Data Model Developer's Guide).

• GeoRaster, a feature that lets you store, index, query, analyze, and deliver GeoRaster data, that is, raster image and gridded data and its associated metadata (described in Oracle Spatial GeoRaster Developer's Guide).

The spatial component of a spatial feature is the geometric representation of its shape in some coordinate space. This is referred to as its geometry.

Note:

Do not modify any packages, tables, or other objects under the MDSYS schema. (The only exception is if you need to create a user-defined coordinate reference system, as explained in Creating a User-Defined Coordinate Reference System.)