[gdal-dev] Using OCI + VRT to access non spatial data

[Frank Warmerdam]

Tamas Szekeres wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> In some of my existing projects the client would like OGR to access
> Oracle and extract point features based on x, y columns in non spatial
> tables. Currently the only option to do such things is to set up
> VRT+ODBC for the data access that would possibly result in the
> VRT-ODBC-OCI-Oracle data access path.
> 
> However not all of the clients can tolerate well the additional burden
> of installing an oracle-odbc driver and using additional system-wide
> settings to access their data. In addition it's sometimes not trivial
> to obtain oracle-odbc driver for a certain platform+processor
> achitecture at all (eg. linux + AMD64 in my case).
> 
> I guess it would be reasonable to change the current OCI driver to
> provide access to tables without having Oracle Spatial to be
> installed. It would allow us to save the extra ODBC layer in the data
> access path mentioned above.
> 
> As looking into the OCI driver to support this would be almost all
> about removing the extra checks for the spatial data types in
> OGROCISession::EstablishSession.
> 
> How about this change?

Tamas,

It sounds like an excellent idea, though I'd ask you only apply it in
trunk (at least for now).

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org