The spatial features in Oracle Spatial and Graph consist of a set of object data types, type methods, and operators, functions, and procedures that use these types. A geometry is stored as an object, in a single row, in a column of type SDO_GEOMETRY. Spatial index creation and maintenance is done using basic DDL (CREATE, ALTER, DROP) and DML (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) statements.
This chapter starts with a simple example that inserts, indexes, and queries spatial data. You may find it helpful to read this example quickly before you examine the detailed data type and metadata information later in the chapter.
This chapter contains the following major sections: