TRENDS IN SPATIAL DATABASES

Spatial databases have been an active area of research for over a decade, addressing the growing data management and analysis needs of spatial applications such as geographic information systems (GIS). This research has produced spatial data types and operators, spatial query languages and processing techniques, and spatial indexing and clustering techniques. In addition, this research also resulted in several extensions to the traditional relational database systems like extensible indexing and entensible optimizers. The objective of this paper is to identify some of the research issues and recent accomplishments in spatial database systems.