Oracle allows single part and multipart geometry objects to existing in a single SDO_GEOMETRY column. For example, a polygon and a multipolygon. This is because the SDO_GEOMETRY object type is singly inherited. (This also means that a single column can also hold geometries from different geometry types eg points, lines and polygons: common in CADRead More
As a spatial practitioner familiar with many aspects of spatial data capture and processing, I have been watching the responses to the opportunity that the National Broadband Network (NBN) offers the people of Australia and its federal, state, local and private spatial practitioners. One hears very little from NBN Co about what it is doingRead More
I often hear asserted in discussions about accessing data in databases that the approach taken should be “database independent”. The assertion is always made as if it were some sort of Scientific Truth (Dogma even). And it is always assumed that this is easy to achieve. Finally, it always seems to be an accepted realityRead More
Over at Alex Willmer’s Misspelled nemesis club there has been a (now-closed) discussion on the successor to the ubiquitous shapefile. Alex points out a lot of the benefits of the shapefile (and there certainly have been many). Before we discuss its “successor”, we should reflect on our business needs and the problems we had withRead More
On the OSGeo website there is a new posting describing the “Tile Map Service Specification”:http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Tile_Map_Service_Specification From the Document Scope: “This standard specifies the behavior of a service that provides access to georeferenced maps in the form of a regularly spaced set of regularly sized squares at a finite number of scales. This standard specifies operationsRead More
I wrote this blog originally on the 18th of August when the announcement first hit my intray. I kept it hidden until I was happy with the factualness of the information it contains. Earlier this year MapInfo announced that the release of version 4.9 of SpatialWare for SQL Server (2005). (SQL Server 2000 is stillRead More
I have spent quite a bit of time at night over the past few weeks re-writing the fundamental Sdo_Geometry access PL/SQL package so that it draws from the experiences gained when I wrote a read-only access Class in VB6 that used Oracle Objects For OLE (OO4O). I converted the basic “Factory” components of the VB6Read More