Using object Relational Database Management Systems to enable enterprise GIS
Tom Helmer
Convergent Group
6399 South Fiddler's Green Circle,
Suite 600
Greenwood Village, CO 80111
System Architecture
Features of the system architecture pictured below (Figure 1):
- Supports all of today's GIS desktop clients used within the enterprise
- Supports web applications
- Supports MapX-enabled applications
- Correlates data from all GIS systems and DBMS systems
- Uses one storage representation for both GIS and Map servers
- Latest DBMS spatial storage structures
- Takes advantage of the concurrency control, scalability, backup, recovery, replication, and
performance of the leading DBMS vendors
- Allows all desktop applications to access all data via declarative SQL
- Visible enterprisewide data within departmental edit sessions
- Leverages all investments in heterogeneous GIS data maintenance applications
- Architecture is a highly layered approach
- N-tiered to support scalability
- Software components provide load balancing and component pooling
The components of the architecture are:
- A RDBMS with spatial data types: This is the persistent storage mechanism for all data.
This allows all map servers, applications servers, and desktop applications to access the
same information and provides a declarative access mechanism for lower application
development. It provides the concurrent control, backup, and recovery and performance
scalability to support enterprise usage requirements.
- A Distribution Server: This service provides the mechanism to distribute the data from
data maintenance environments to the enterprise Spatial Data Warehouse and supports
keeping N copies of the Spatial Data Warehouse in synch. The data distribution portion
of this paper will go into detail on why replication servers were implemented to support
both performance and reliability.
- A GIS Server: This service provides the spatial analysis applications that may be needed
by the map server or other desktop applications.
- A Map Server: This service serves up maps on demand by the web server.
- A Spatial Data Translator: This service provides the data-loading and data-extraction
services required to integrate heterogeneous GIS data maintenance environments.
- A Heterogeneous DBMS Gateway: This service provides the access and correlation
power to other spatial databases in the enterprise.
Figure 1. Enterprise Spatial Data Warehouse Architecture
Supporting MapX-enabled applications goes a long way to spatially enabling all desktop
applications since MapX is an OLE custom control that offers true object linking and
embedding.
Providing web access gives the enterprise a very inexpensive data distribution mechanism. An
architecture that supports correlating all data from both GIS and DBMS systems supports enduser
applications being developed much more quickly and provides a stronger decision support
data resource to answer more complex questions.
Using the latest DBMS spatial storage structures supports scalable performance, open
architecture, access for CAD and mapping applications, GIS-viewing desktop tools, and ad hoc
user requirements.
Provides persistent storage of facility network connectivity and topology relationships. The user
is allowed to request analysis on-demand rather than querying and rebuilding these relationships
from the native spatial data warehouse package on the fly in order to support a suite of
heterogeneous GIS analysis applications, CAD applications and MapX-enabled applications.
