Exploring additional data sources

Several optional formats are supported by GeoServer beyond the built-in data sources. In the remaining part of this chapter, we will explore a couple of RDBMS quite popular and supporting spatial data: Oracle and MySQL.

Using Oracle

Oracle is probably the most widely-used commercial RDBMS. It has support for spatial since release 7, back in 1980's. The current release, 11.2, comes with two flavors of spatial data extensions, Oracle Spatial and Oracle Locator . They share the same geometry type and basic set of operators and functions. Oracle Spatial incorporates a richer set of functions for spatial analysis. Oracle is not free open source software like GeoServer or PostGIS and it has a quite complicated and expensive license model. We won't cover installation here; as long as you are going to use Oracle, you should have expertise and/or a proper budget to have it up and running.