Abstract: In the automotive and aerospace industry, millions of technical documents are generated during the development of complex engineering products. Particularly, the universal application of Computer Aided Design (CAD) from the very first design to the final documentation created the need for transactional, concurrent, reliable, and secure data management. The huge underlying CAD databases, occupying terabytes of distributed secondary and tertiary storage, are typically stored and referenced in Engineering Data Management systems (EDM) and organized by means of hierarchical product structures. Although most CAD files represent spatial objects or contain spatially related data, existing EDM systems do not efficiently support the evaluation of spatial predicates. In this paper, we introduce spatial database technology into the file-based world of CAD. As we integrate 3D spatial data management into standard object-relational database systems, the required support for data independe...