Re: Oracle Spatial Options and Data Warehouse

From: Ronan Miles <milesr_at_entcf2.agw.bt.co.uk>
Date: 1996/10/18
Message-ID: <3267903A.59D9_at_entcf2.agw.bt.co.uk>#1/1


Christopher B. Browne wrote:

> >Oracle Spatial Data option supports many (around 32?) dimensions.
> >
> >These can be enumerated values for a variety of things and hence it can
> >be used for more than just geographic data. One can envisage dimensions
> >of 'Diseases','Treatments','Demographics','Survivability', etc. However,
> >it may be a leap of faith to start exploiting this stuff.
>
> It of course begs the question "why?"
>
> The reason for spatial data to be interesting is because it allows joint
> operations between the dimensions, particularly in calculating distances.
I think you have answered the question. Nearness is a concept not literally associated with distance. The clustering of survivors to a certain treatment for a given disease is an interesting piece of information that can be indicated visually.

If at the end of the day we are saying that this could be a useful large scale engine to sit behind an OLAP tool would be agreeing with Oracle who see Express being able to exploit these structures (at least that was the message I picked up at IOUW95). The question is more how can you start to do that now.

Fundamentally, spatial data option pertaining to 32 dimensions is a daft name when clasical physics gives up the ghost in the mid-20s. Received on Fri Oct 18 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST

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