GeoRaptor: Visualising Geometry Objects

Visualising Geometry Objects

SDO_GEOMETRY objects have a well defined structure whose textual representation is well known and visually accessible. GeoRaptor presents two string representations: the first a simple textual representation, and the other an HTML representation which includes the colouring of ordinate offsets to aid understanding of the relationship between the SDO_ELEM_INFO_ARRAY and the SDO_ORDINATE_ARRAY.

SDO_GEOMETRY objects can also be converted to other representations: Well Known Text (WKT), Geography Markup Language (GML) and Keyhole Markup Language (KML) are three common ones. GeoRaptor allows for geometry objects to be exposed as these representations.

Finally, GeoRaptor can represent geometry objects as actual thumbnail images in SQL Developer result sets. Think of this as a spreadsheet with the geometry column being displayed as an actual mapped object. This is a powerful way of representing geometry objects and GeoRaptor is, AFAIK, the only application that does this across any (including non-Oracle) database

Visualising Geometry Coordinates

Oracle SDO_GEOMETRY coordinates are stored in a single SDO_ORDINATE_ARRAY data regardless as to the number of coordinate dimensions. So, 2D data is organised as (X,Y,X,Y,X,Y …), 3D as (X,Y,Z,X,Y,Z…) etc. GeoRaptor allows for the ordinates in the SDO_ORDINATE_ARRAY to be visually presented as coordinates via the use of different types of braces (eg {}) with optional coordinate number suffix. The following images show such representation. (The choice of brackets and suffix is in Tools>Preferences>GeoRaptor>Spatial View.)

NOTE: Be aware that the coloured SDO_GEOMETRY, with coordinate grouping and indexing, uses HTML and can be quite memory intensive where a lot of rows are being visualised.