Summary: Paper describes a technology of storing rasters in Oracle database with usage of Oracle Spatial, Oracle intermedia option and Workspace managers. Rasters are displayed in MicroStation v8

Date: October 2002, Published in : ControlAltDelete III. 2002, Authors: Stanislav Sumbera, Petr Vinduska

Original site location 2002: http://www.sumbera.com/ustation/articles/Rasters/Rasters2.htm

Introduction

MicroStation plays important role in geoinformation systems (GIS) especially in Automated Mapping/Facility Management (AM/FM). In these areas, raster data such as satellite images, air photos, scanned topographical maps or other types of imagery are becoming increasingly popular. It has been estimated that these data may represents more than 90% of the average GIS data holding by volume. MicroStation V8 comes with Raster Manager as a solution for united raster management of different raster formats. Oracle 9i brings its GIS technologies like Spatial option, interMedia or Database Workspace Manager for effective database storing of geographical-related data. Oracle database is used in number of organizations to manage all kinds of data across the enterprise.

In this article, we will join Oracle GIS technologies with MicroStation v8 to build up a prototype called “Image Storage” for storing rasters in Oracle9i database using Oracle interMedia, Oracle Spatial, Oracle Workspace Manager and finally displaying query results with help of Raster Manager and it’s clipping capabilities. We are going to point out some interesting concepts and techniques in Image Storage.

Nowadays there are only a few solutions for storing rasters in databases, actually most of the interest in raster management lies in using compressed proprietary formats like Mr.SID or ECW. Note ECW is supported in MicroStation v8 as well. Continue reading →