Spatial Database

A spatial database system is a full‐fledged database system with additional capabilities to represent, store, manage, and query spatial objects , that is, geometric entities embedded in space. Spatial objects represent two‐dimensional points, lines, and regions. But increasingly, also more complex geometric structures, such as three‐dimensional objects, spatial networks, and spatial subdivisions, can be handled. A spatial database system provides the complete data management infrastructure for processing large volumes of spatial data and is the spatial data provider for many geospatial applications such as geographical information systems and spatial analysis packages. Its main features are the definition of spatial data types to represent different kinds of spatial objects, the introduction of spatial operations and spatial predicates to process and check the properties of spatial objects, the embedding of these concepts into spatial query languages , and spatial index structures enabling fast access to spatial objects. The discussion here focuses on user aspects and does not consider implementation aspects.