Much of the data that we encounter has a spatial (geographic locational) aspect yet this has not been readily exploited by traditional RDBMS. Over the past five years there has been a confluence of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, RDBMS architecture and SQL standards that has fostered the implementation of spatial processing within the RDBMS. This paper will present a brief overview of spatial processing and the evolution of technology leading to the development of the IBM DB2 Spatial Extender that exploits the IBM DB2 Universal Database (UDB) object-relational support to implement a standards-based SQL spatial capability.
David W. Adler