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

[Tamas Szekeres]

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?

Best regards,

Tamas