Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

There’s an interesting article currently running over on OTN entitled "Use
Location Information in Enterprise Reporting". According to the
introduction, the article helps you "Learn how to
create dynamic maps that make the relationships between attribute and
location-based information a lot more visible for business intelligence
analysis."

The article’s about two Oracle products that help you add GIS functionality
to your data warehouse; the
Spatial Option to the Enterprise
Edition of the database, and the new
Oracle Application Server MapViewer, a J2EE service for rendering maps using location
data by provided by the
Spatial Option. The Spatial Option lets you add geographic attributes to data in
your database using an  OpenGIS-compliant object type called SDO_GEOMETRY,
and comes with SQL operators that let us make comparisons between two map
points. For example, a typical SQL query using given in the article that uses
the Spatial Option would be:

SELECT a.cust_last_name
 FROM customers a
 WHERE
   SDO_WITHIN_DISTANCE(a.cust_geo_location, mdsys.sdo_geometry (2001, 8307,
                              mdsys.sdo_point_type (6.1667, 46.2, null),
                              null, null),
                           'distance=20000 unit=meter') = 'TRUE';

What makes this interesting is the new
Oracle Application
Server MapViewer, a J2EE application that comes with Application Server 10g
(9.0.4) and displays data stored using the Spatial Option. The article comes
with a JDeveloper project file that builds a map from spatial data in the
database, and the displays the map using the Mapviewer application. The article
then goes on to show how this map can be called from Oracle Discoverer 9iAS,
allowing us to integrate mapping in to our Discoverer reporting solution.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the Spatial
Option and Mapviewer, there’s an Oracle-by-Example tutorial available on OTN
titled

"Performing Location-Based Analysis". You can also find out more
on the OTN
Mapviewer homepage and in the

Oracle Spatial User’s Guide and Reference.

Posted in Application Server |