Oracle Spatial User Conference 2011 Wrap Up

The Oracle Spatial User Conference is a single day event with about 150 people and was held in Washington, D.C. last week. It was the first time the meeting was held in DC and the first time it was not held in conjunction with the GITA Annual conference.

The conference continues to be an excellent venue not just for end users but for DBA's who need to know about current product functionality. The first sessions are highly technical overviews of the product and this year emphasized the relatoinship of Oracle Spatial to the Exadata Database Machine and Exalogic Elastic Cloud. The techical training sessions for MapViewer development should not be missed if you are currently developing for web services applicaitons.

Also this year, there was ever increasing emphasis on the integration of spatial applications with Oracle's business intelligence suite. Every year for the past few, I hear more about how Oracle BI is leveraging Spatial. The Oracle Fusion project, the intergration of multiple acquisitions by Oracle over the years, seems complete. Now, some of the features like thematic mapping may not be very exciting but they appear to be quite new to some in the audience who asked some pretty basic questions. While it is still an educational process for some, it's likely one that Oracle seems ready to continue given its expansive user base of Oracle products that could eventually leverage geospatial visualizations.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine the Focus of Oracle Spatial User Conference

Jim Steiner, Oracle's VP of Server Technology, opened the Oracle Spatial User Conference by talking about the focus of the event which was "extreme spatial performance and the introduction of Oracle's Exalogic Elastic Cloud and the Exadata Database Machine. Steiner said that the Exadata Database Machine was not just a preconfigured set of hardware, but engineered explicitly to run the Oracle database and handle the most demanding geospatial workloads. He discussed the fact that 15 years ago when Oracle introduced Oracle Spatial it was a "niche technology." "The vision hasn't changed but the technology has evolved and now includes grid computing, "the cloud,"  virtualization and now database machines; "Oracle has remained true to this vision even with a changing technology landscape," said Steiner.

Another emphasis was to stress how Oracle Spatial is part of the Oracle database kernel and how it is architected to exploit the processing power bandwidth and parallelism of the Exadata Database Machine. Spatial operations can be performed in up to two terabytes of database systems global area memory. Other features of the Exalogic Database Machine is:

• Eight 2-socket database servers
• 96 database CPU cores
• 768 GB database server memory
• runs Solaris
• Database grid: up to 128 Intel cores connected by 40 Gb/second InfiniBand fabric for massive parallel query processing
• Raw Disk - up to 336 TB of uncompressed storage
• Memory - up to 2 TB
• Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression (EHCC) - query and archive modes available 10x-30x compression
• Storage servers - up to 14 storage servers (168 Intel cores) that can perform massive parallel smart scans. Smart scans offloads SQL predicate filtering to the raw data blocks. This results in much less data transferred and dramatically improved performance
• Storage flash cache - up to 5.3 TB w/ i/o resource managemen

The meeting continues through today and more reports will be forthcoming.

GIS Developer/API Tidbits - 4/19/11

Nanaimo, BC is holding a hackathon for developers to work with the city's and province's data April 30, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Registration is capped at 40 (20 seats are filled) and closes Apri 21.

Examples of some of the data from the city  and 

Examples of data from the province

- BC Local News via @manomarks

In a product announcement bid aimed at improving Oracle Database developer productivity, the company has this week announced the availability of Oracle SQL Developer 3.0. This graphical tool for database development has been augmented with new migration functionalities designed to appeal to development and database administrator (DBA) tasks. It also introduces support for Oracle Data Mining and Oracle Spatial -- a tool to manage all geospatial data including vector and raster data, topology, and network models.

- Dr. Dobbs

Data Science Toolkit .35 released

- @RWWgeo

Four Drivers for the Geocloud #GWF

Steve Hagan, VP of Development, Server Technology, Oracle, discussed platforms issues for the development of geocloud at the Geospatial World Forum in Hyderabad. He identified four global drivers for geospatial cloud computing:

• Big data - terabytes and petabytes of data
  • Sensors, RFID, LiDAR, etc.
• Big Software
  • Spatially enable all applications: ERP, CRM, BI
• Real time Analytics
  • Big value from fastest response – streams and events
  • Tracking in real time and predicting where people, or payloads will be
  • BI in real time
• Big hardware
  • Cloud platforms
  • Massively parallel data base machines

And scalability is needed to support all of the above.

Oracle Spatial Direction Update

At the Oracle Spatial User Group meeting in Phoenix, Xavier Lopez, director of Oracle Spatial and Semantic Technologies, addressed the Oracle Spatial users in an opening keynote presentation about new developments for the product.

Oracle 11G Release 2 is the current version but Oracle is heavily working on 12G…if that’s what it will be called, according to Lopez.

"Location enabling business applications has been a big effort for us, especially in utilities," said Lopez. In addition, Oracle continues to support the open source community by working diligently on specifications such as GDAL in addition to supporting the traditional GIS markets for public sector solutions in state and local government.

New themes discussed at this meeting were an indication that Oracle is moving beyond current opportunities and moving to increasingly larger enterprise applications such as enterprise clouds. Oracle is leveraging massive clustering environments and a new generation of storage technologies for faster access and better analytics. Much of this effort is being driving by increasingly larger amounts of data from sensors.

Future Direction
Lopez discussed where Oracle will emphasize product development in the near term.

• Geo-reference data types
• 3D virtual reality models
• Sensors (e.g. LiDAR imagery)
• Geo-reference video - Here, Oracle views video data as nothing but another sensor.
• Real-time geo-processing such as ingesting real-time sensor data and processing the data at millisecond level speed. Because of the immediacy of getting data to decision-makers, the user often does not have time to move it down to database but must use in-memory processing. Oracle is looking at sensor fusion applications which Lopez believes is another area that will become mainstream.
• Complex event processing (CEP)
• Sensor fusion
• Spatial Reasoning
• Semantic Web integration will enable a whole new level of analytics, reasoning and inferencing. This is still in the early R&D phase but Lopez believes it will have an impact on the geospatial industry.
• Support for open source, commercial tools and support for OGC specifications. "Standards in general are very important to us," said Lopez.