Spatial Databases: An overview

Spatial databases maintain space information which is appropriate for applications where there is need to monitor the position of an object or event over space. Spatial databases describe the fundamental representation of the object of a dataset that comes from spatial or geographic entities. A spatial database supports aspects of space and offers spatial data types in its data model and query language. The spatial or geographic referencing attributes of the objects in a spatial database permits them to be positioned within a two (2) dimensional or three (3) dimensional space. This chapter looks into the fundamentals of spatial databases and describes their basic component, operations and architecture. The study focuses on the data models, query Language, query processing, indexes and query optimization of a spatial databases that approves spatial databases as a necessary tool for data storage and retrieval for multidimensional data of high dimensional spaces.