Oracle Corp, with its new Oracle7 MultiDimension extension, is claiming to be the first major database vendor to provide support for spatial data. The company has a patent pending on the technology, which it says enables organisations to build enterprise-wide decision support systems around a common database architecture capable of handling all types of information – structured, text, images, video, audio and spatial. Oracle gives the name spatial data to data that is defined by multiple dimensions – latitude, longitude and elevation, which typically describes the geographic characteristics of a particular area or object. It suggests that an insurance company might use MultiDimension to work out the potential liability to its policy-holders of a major flood by plotting the location of their homes relative to the flood plain of the nearby river, and retailers might use a demographic database to target promotions or decide between alternative locations for new stores. The technology will initially be aimed at the Geographic Information Systems market, and later moved into the decision-support and data-warehousing markets. It says the algorithms in Oracle7 MultiDimension are designed for managing all kinds of spatial information, and are flexible enough to serve as the data engine for varied applications. The Oracle7 MultiDimension add-on starts at $4,520 for an eight-user licence and arrives in May for Solaris, Digital Unix and HP-UX. It requires Oracle7 v7.1.4.
