Oracle Spatial and Graph


Oracle Spatial and Graph, formerly Oracle Spatial, is a free option component of the Oracle Database. 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, and geographic information systems, to wireless location services and location-enabled e-business. The graph features in Oracle Spatial and Graph include Oracle Network Data Model graphs used in traditional network applications in major transportation, telcos, utilities and energy organizations and RDF semantic graphs used in social networks 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 schema and functions that facilitate the storage, retrieval, update, and query of collections of spatial features in an Oracle database.

Geospatial data features

The Oracle Spatial geospatial data features consist of:
The Network 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:
The RDF Semantic Graph feature supports the World Wide Web Consortium RDF standards. It provides RDF data management, querying and inferencing that are commonly used in a variety of applications ranging from semantic data integration to social network analysis and linked open data applications. Its features include:

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. 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 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. 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 spatial indexing system for SDO involved an adaptation of Riemannian hypercube 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-size data repositories that CHS and other major corporate users required, and also improving search and retrieval times. The "helical hyperspatial code", or HHCode, as developed by CHS and implemented by Oracle Spatial, comprises a form of space-filling curve.
With Oracle 8, Oracle Corporation marketing dubbed the spatial extension simply "Oracle Spatial". The primary spatial indexing system no longer uses the HHCode, but a standard r-tree 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.