Understanding geospatial databases
A geospatial database, or geodatabase, refers to an entire category of file formats, data schemas, and even software. In Chapter 3, The Geospatial Technology Landscape, we’ll cover geodatabases as software packages, formally known as database management systems. But in this section, we’ll describe their attributes as file formats. Geodatabases historically stored only vector data, though modern geodatabases are well-suited to raster data management as well.
Geodatabases can exhibit all of the common traits we noted previously. This information is stored in the database, in what we call the database model. A very popular model is the traditional relational model, which uses tables of rows and columns. Each row and column combination is called a cell. Rows can be related to another table to link information using a designated column where each cell becomes a key referencing a cell in another table that then links the rows together.
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