Point-in-polygon spatial queries

Hello!
I've got Oracle 8i EE installed on a Win NT 4.0 server. I have some questions about writing spatial queries (I'm brand new to the Oracle Spatial Cartridge). My company has purchased a ton of data from MapInfo and loaded several MapInfo tables into our Oracle db. We're at a point now where we're trying to figure out how to query the data we've loaded. I need a query that will, when fed a latitude and longitude, find all polygons in a spatial table that contain that point. I've looked at the Oracle 8i documentation, and it says that it's possible to do such a query, but I'm having trouble pulling the query I need from the doc's examples. For example, suppose I have a point in space represented by latitude 12.345678 and longitude 87.654321, and suppose I have two tables (one spatial table and its associated index table) with the following structures: Table 1: "Spatial_table". Structure:

    NPA        VARCHAR2(10)           NULL,
    NXX        VARCHAR2(10)           NULL,
    NUMB       VARCHAR2(10)           NULL,
    PRINX      NUMBER                 NULL,
    GEOLOC     MDSYS.SDO_GEOMETRY     NULL

Table 2: "Spatial_table_SX_HL12N4$".  Structure:
    SDO_GROUPCODE RAW(14)     NULL,
    SDO_ROWID     ROWID       NULL,
    SDO_CODE      RAW(14)     NULL,
    SDO_META      RAW(14)     NULL,
    SDO_MAXCODE   RAW(14)     NULL

Could someone please:
1)Let me know if the two tables above, along with a point in space, give me everything I need to write my query, and 2)send me a query that returns the NPA, NXX, and NUMB columns for all rows in the spatial_table whose polygons contain the point in space listed above?
3)Give me the title of a good book that covers the Spatial Cartridge and Spatial queries in depth?
(In case you're wondering, our MapInfo representative is swamped and won't be able to help us for at least a few weeks, which is more time to wait than we have.)

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide. And sorry about the terribly long post.

Thanks,
Vince

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Before you buy. Received on Tue Nov 23 1999 - 14:12:17 CST