[gdal-dev] Compiling GDAL --with-oci

[Lucena, Ivan]

Smith, Michael D ERDC-CRREL-NH wrote:
> Ivan,
> 
>   Oracle express edition does support SDO_GEOMETRY.
> 
> Mike
> 
> 

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your correction. I always thought that the express edition was not capable to support 
Simple Feature therefore it would not be useful with GDAL/OGR/OCI.

That would clarify (or not) a little bit:

"""
Oracle Locator/Oracle Spatial Primer

One of the most powerful but least understood features of the Oracle relational database management 
system (Oracle Express Edition through Oracle Enterprise Edition) is Oracle Locator. By definition, 
"Oracle Locator is a feature of Oracle Database 10g Standard and Enterprise Editions that provides 
core location functionality needed by most customer applications." However, Oracle Locator offers a 
lot more than this. At face value, Oracle Locator gives users the option of storing location 
information (geospatial or otherwise), such as longitudes and latitudes, in the same tables and rows 
as the rest of data. Yet Oracle Locator goes much further: using this standard feature, users can 
also perform location analysis on the same data.

So when you simply want to return all information about something that happens to exist within some 
distance of something else, why go to a map or a GIS? Oracle Locator can do this for you right in 
the database. And, of course, with regards to Oracle Spatial (an option of Oracle Enterprise 
Edition), the rabbit hole gets deeper-much deeper. Fundamentally, Oracle Locator and Oracle Spatial 
are really the same. They share the same core object type (SDO_GEOMETRY) as well as the same 
metadata and indexing scheme.

However, whereas Oracle Locator provides impressive core location analysis functionality (such as 
the ability to find all the data that has some kind of topological relationship to other data), 
Oracle Spatial builds on top of this the capability to store and manage image and gridded raster 
data and metadata; create and analyze linear-referenced, network, and topology data models; turn 
text-based address information into longitude/latitude with geocoding; provide driving directions 
via an integrated routing engine; and perform deep, multidimensional spatial analysis and mining on 
location and other data. The name of the game for both Oracle Locator and Oracle Spatial is that 
data and analyses are available to any client that can connect to and query from an Oracle 
database"""[http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/lokitz-spatial-geoserver.html]

Regards,

Ivan