Applying and Extending Oracle Spatial

Simon Greener has university qualifi cations in geomatics, computing science,
database technologies, and project management.
He started his working career with mining and surveying experience. He then found
his calling as a computer scientist with his fi rst job as a database programmer on
IBM mainframes for Telstra. He switched to GIS three years later through working
in a multi-disciplinary GIS research team at Telecom's Research Laboratories (TRL)
in Clayton, Victoria. While at TRL, he worked on projects whose outcome saw the
creation of what is now Telstra's Sensis group.
After leaving TRL, he worked as a lecturer and consultant for CenSIS (University
of Tasmania) under Professor Peter Zwart, writing student and technical training
courses. While there, he continued to consult to Telstra's Directory Services and
Mobile groups. It was here that he came in contact with the Spatial DataBase Engine
(SDBE) from Geographic Technologies Incorporated (GTI) and saw its potential
for the management of large scale spatial databases within relational database
technologies, a merging of his IT and GIS worlds. This led to the foundation of
Salamanca Software Pvt Ltd (SalSoft), for which he was a Director until it was
purchased by ESRI Australia in 1996.
Some notable achievements while at SalSoft included helping brokers with the
sale of SDBE to ESRI Inc (now ArcSDE), winning the fi rst ArcSDE sale to Telstra to
power its White pages/Yellow pages mapping portal, co-authoring a geocoding
specifi cation for Spatial Decision Systems (now Sensis), consulting for Geographic
Technologies Australia on numerous projects based on Universal Press street
directory data, and the creation of GeoCASE/Blueprint, the world's fi rst data
modeling tool that enabled the modeling of spatial data and relationships.
In 1997, he was appointed GIS Manager for Forestry Tasmania (FT) in Hobart,
Tasmania. While at FT, he architected the complete revamp of FT's GIS systems
using Oracle Spatial (being one of the earliest adopters of the Sdo_Geometry
implementation) as the core data management technology. He was concentrating
on embedding geospatial data and processing within business systems via a valueoriented,
business-centric computing model. He designed and built numerous
systems during those years, the best of which was MapComposer, a three-click
web-enabled business map production system that, when he left in 2005, had grown
(2000-) to over 320 online uses, producing over 50,000 maps a year from a repository
of over 100 different map templates (still in operation in 2013). His years at FT
concluded with the writing of a GIS Strategy that saw the use of GIS increase yet the
cost of the technology to the organization decrease.
He left FT in September 2005 for the precarious world of self-employment. He was a
sometime copyist for Directions Magazine. As a subcontractor to a Spatial distributor
in Australia, he wrote a Radius Topology training course and provided Radius
Topology and Oracle Spatial consulting services for them at numerous customer sites
until May 2006. From May to August 2006, he was engaged by Spatial, Cambridge,
UK, under a UK Government Department of Trade and Industry's GlobalWatch
program to conduct research and development in relation to enhancing the export
potential of their latest product, Radius Studio (this resulted in Radius Studio being
integrated with Feature Data Objects - FDO technology to extend its data access
capabilities).
In his consulting career, he has written a spatial strategy document and conducted
a database performance analysis review for a large Tasmanian Government
department. He has conducted a number of Oracle spatial database best practice,
tender and system, and return on investment reviews at a number of Victorian
Government departments. He wrote and delivered a user requirements document
for Enterprise GIS at a large Australian corporation. He also provided guidance
and implementation services to an ambulance service helping integrate Oracle
Spatial into a data warehouse project that used Oracle Portal, Discoverer, and
Data Warehouse Builder. He delivered many solutions for a NSW water authority;
and fi nally, he successfully completed many migration, publication, return on
investment, process improvement, and database design contracts for a number
of Canberra-based Federal Government departments. Simon makes available a
collection of PL/SQL and Java-based sample solutions for the Oracle database via his
website. He is also principal programmer for the SQL Developer spatial extension,
GeoRaptor. Finally, he was awarded, the 2011 Oracle Spatial Excellence Award for
Education and Research by Oracle.
His technical areas of expertise include systems design and architecture (spatial and
attribute), data management, and modeling in both the OLTP and OLAP spaces, and
he is also an evangelist for O-RDMS-based spatial data. He is available for free-lance
geospatial solutions architecture work, Java and PL/SQL programming, and he
provides Oracle Spatial benchmarking and performance enhancement services.
His non-technical interests are his family, friends, walking, reading, singing, and
motorcycle riding. Siva Ravada earned a PhD degree from the University of Minnesota in the fi eld
of Spatial Databases before joining Oracle's Spatial development team. He is now a
Senior Director of Development at Oracle Corporation. At Oracle, Siva was one of
the founding team members of the Spatial development team before taking over the
team management responsibilities. Siva now manages the Spatial and MapViewer
development teams at Oracle. He has more than 15 years of experience in spatial
databases and application development. He has also co-authored more than 30
articles published in journals, and holds more than 30 patents. He has also presented
key-note speeches at several conferences on the topics of spatial databases and GIS.
Oracle is the second largest software company and the number one database
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