Summary
In this chapter, we have taken an in-depth look at the concept of storing spatial data in a database, and examined three of the principal open source spatial databases. We have seen the following:
Spatial databases differ from ordinary relational databases as they directly support spatial data types, spatial queries, and spatial joins
Spatial indexes generally make use of R-Tree data structures to represent nested hierarchies of bounding boxes
Spatial indexes can be used to quickly find geometries based on their position in space, as well as for performing spatial comparisons between geometries based on their bounding boxes
MySQL, the world's most popular open source database, has spatial capabilities built in, though with some limitations
PostGIS is considered to be the powerhouse of spatial databases, built on top of the PostgreSQL open source database engine
SpatiaLite is an extension to the SQLite serverless database, with a large number of spatial capabilities built in
Each database...
