A spatial database stores and queries data about objects in space, including geographic, geometric, and spatial data. It offers additional capabilities for handling spatial data, such as spatial data types (SDTs) and topological relationships. Spatial databases are used for corporate, government, marketing, and commercial data, and can be used for data analysis. They can handle massive amounts of information and have special index functions for manipulating and querying data.
A database optimized for storing and querying data about objects in space, including lines, points, and polygons, is called a spatial database. Various fields of study have multiple applications for handling geometric data, geographic data, and spatial data. In these databases, a “space” can be geographic such as a map of the earth’s surface, geometric such as a layout of a large-scale integration project (VLSI), or spatial such as a 3D representation of chains of protein molecules. The spatial database is similar to a standard database with additional capabilities for handling spatial data. For example, spatial data types (SDTs) are offered in the query language and data model of a spatial database.
When a spatial database is used for geographic mapping, its SDTs indicate the structure in a space, such as points, lines, and regions, and the relationships between structures, such as lines intersecting with each other. A user may see these entities represented by roads, pipes, or forests on a map, but in a programming view they are represented by lines, polygons, or points. These types of databases are called object-based spatial databases. In addition, topological relationships, such as overlapping or disarticulation of lines, and directional relationships, such as cardinal compass directions, are represented and programmed into a geographic spatial database. Metric relationships, which indicate the distance of objects, are also represented in these databases.
Spatial databases are used for corporate, government, marketing, and commercial data. A company can map concentrations of where a certain type of customer is to plan the best place to build another building, or a politician can survey a voting population to plan a campaign route. They can also be used for city and regional planning or used by law enforcement jurisdictions for crime pattern analysis. SDTs can be simple information, but they can also become very complex if what the user needs to know is very specific. These complex relationships of objects in space are what make spatial databases advantageous because they can use and sort massive amounts of information.
Often, specific objects in a given spatial database have a number of variables associated with them. In this case, a spatial database can use a structured query language (SQL) to provide special index functions for manipulating and querying data. While it can be used purely for storage, the database can be used for much more, including data analysis. Objects in the database can contain an infinite amount of variables, and special spatial database tools allow for sorting of various information.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
