Ellipse Data Type? Best practices for elliptical data? [Oracle 9i Spatial]

[This is a repost from an Oracle.com forum thread. I'm trying to gather more information, so please respond with your insight. Thank you!]

I'm developing a GIS app for Oracle Spatial (9i r2) that requires me to enter elliptical data (lat/lon center, major/minor axis length, rotation angle).

In my reading it appears that Oracle Spatial does not provide native support for ellipses. Am I wrong?

Even if that's the case, it seems there would be a way to represent an ellipse using a multi-line set of arcs, or something like that. Can anyone share with me their best practices on how to represent ellipse data?

From: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jsp?forum=76&thread=244755

Hans wrote:
> I would store it as a linestring of arcs. In addition
> you could add an extra element of type 0,0 (
> etype,interpretation) where you could store the
> ellipsis data like center, axis lengths and
> rotation.

Any idea how to calculate the data for those arcs, given the center point, axis lengths and rotation angle of the ellipse?

88058 wrote:
> In 10g there is a new function that will generate an
> approximation of an ellipse based on center point,
> ...
> SDO_UTIL.ELLIPSE_POLYGON(
This is great information--thank you.

Do you happen to know what 10g uses to approximate the ellipse? Unfortunately, I think I may be limited to 9i on this one.

But I'll definitely keep that info in mind for future projects on 10g. Received on Tue May 18 2004 - 10:54:17 CDT