IN-DATABASE RASTER ANALYTICS: MAP ALGEBRA AND PARALLEL PROCESSING IN ORACLE SPATIAL GEORASTER

Abstract. Over the past decade several products have been using enterprise database technology to store and manage geospatial imagery and raster data inside RDBMS, which in turn provides the best manageability and security. With the data volume growing exponentially, real-time or near real-time processing and analysis of such big data becomes more challenging. Oracle Spatial GeoRaster, different from most other products, takes the enterprise database-centric approach for both data management and data processing. This paper describes one of the central components of this database-centric approach: the processing engine built completely inside the database. Part of this processing engine is raster algebra, which we call the In-database Raster Analytics. This paper discusses the three key characteristics of this in-database analytics engine and the benefits. First, it moves the data processing closer to the data instead of moving the data to the processing, which helps achieve greater performance by overcoming the bottleneck of computer networks. Second, we designed and implemented a new raster algebra expression language. This language is based on PL/SQL and is currently focused on the "local" function type of map algebra. This language includes general arithmetic, logical and relational operators and any combination of them, which dramatically improves the analytical capability of the GeoRaster database. The third feature is the implementation of parallel processing of such operations to further improve performance. This paper also presents some sample use cases. The testing results demonstrate that this in-database approach for raster analytics can effectively help solve the biggest performance challenges we are facing today with big raster and image data.