Topological relationship query processing for complex regions in Oracle Spatial

Although geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial database communities have extensively studied topological relationships for more than two decades, there is little literature describing how to efficiently implement them in GIS and spatial database systems. This is rather surprising considering that topological relationship queries are supported in many GIS and spatial database systems including IBM Informix Spatial and Geodetic DataBlades, ESRI SDE, Microsoft SQL server 2008, Oracle Spatial and PostGIS. In order to bridge this gap, we report our experience with implementing several optimization techniques in Oracle Spatial to speed up topological relationship query processing for query windows represented by complex regions (such as polygons or multi-polygons). Our experiments, utilizing real-world data sets, demonstrate that topological relationship query performance can be significantly improved using the proposed techniques.