Essential Guide to Oracle Spatial :

Rating:
Summary: The Case For Space
Review: No. This is not a screed for planetary exploration! The space here refers to geographic space. The book differs from most database texts, where typically the data might refer to products or customers, each with many attributes. In our case, the data has a natural geographic distribution or interpretation. Hence the many diagrams which are maps.

The subject of geographic databases is huge. With many topological or geometric nuances based on how to define regions on a map. The book talks about important commercial applications, like geocoding, where we map from a street address [say] to geographic coordinates, or vice versa. This is the gist of Geographic Information Systems [GIS]. Indeed, the entire book can be considered as a manual about applying Oracle to GIS.

There is a nice chapter on the Oracle MapViewer. Showing how it can easily draw maps of your data. Vital, for it lets your brain visually analyse the data. Our visual pattern recognition is still vastly superior than machine matching, and MapViewer lets you bring that wetwear apparatus to bear on your problems.

The only drawback about this book is that it ends too soon.


Rating:
Summary: Excellent book, fascinating topic
Review: Pro Oracle Spatial is a well written introduction to Oracle's spatial database extensions. Using this mechanism you can attach geometry data to your records and then search them using geometric patterns. Think of Yahoo maps as a good example of this. in fact, the case study portion of the book is a mapping website that you can search and overlay points of interest on. In addition the book demonstrates, to some degree, finding the best route between two spatial points.

It's a thick book on a thick topic, hard-backed, and well illustrated. The style is as walkthrough. Going through each section of the SDO extensions and showing how they are used in context. It's not a good reference work.