An Extensible Architecture for Supporting Spatial Data in RDBMS

Abstract

Business intelligence has been the driving force for tight integration of traditional and non-taditional data, such as geographical information , in databases and dtabase applications. Database vendors are finding ways to extend their RDBMSto support these new types of data. In this paper, we present the technology behind the DB2Spatial Extender that directly supports spatial data typers used by geographical inofrmation systems (GIS) applications. We also describe our index extensions to the B-tree indexes, so that spatial indexes can be built upon existiong B-tree indexes, without changing the underlying B-tree index structures.