Talk:Geodatabase

Be cautious! The development of "spatial database" does have "geodatabase" in mind, but not necessary equals to it. The geodatabase, strictly speaking, is from ESRI product and development. It can be treated as a subset of spatial database, a very widely used one. However, the spatial database has broader meanings, by definition, to record all sort of data that relate to spatial relationship. If one wants to investigate the spatial relations between two atoms, s/he won't use geodatabase but spatial database.

Well, geodatabase is an ESRI product. There is also more generic term "geographic database", which is used by "GIS people", who are influenced by ESRI. The term "Spatial database" came from "database people". I would bet that it came from "Spatial" extension of Oracle RDBMS or from Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). In both cases the word spatial/geo(graphic) means the ability of a DBMS to store, index and query two dimensional data, while normal databases can store, index and query just one dimensional(lexical) data.Smrcek (talk) 19:51, 28 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Spatial database is more generic than Geodatabase. Basically, a geodatabase somewhat implies that it is meant for 2D or 3D data, and may have additional interest in longitude and latitude spherical models and things such as surface distances. A true spatial database is basically a database with arbitrary high dimensional indexes and support for range and distance queries, without a direct connection to the "physical world" and its limitations. Therefore, I do not support the merger proposal, but Geodatabases should be presented as a specialized type of spatial database. --Chire (talk) 11:25, 5 June 2010 (UTC)