Geodetic Point-In-Polygon Query Processing in Oracle Spatial

As Global Positioning Systems (GPSs) are increasingly ubiquitous, spatial database systems are also encountering increasing use of location or point data, which is often expressed in geodetic coordinates: longitude and latitude. A simple but very important question regarding this data is whether the locations lie within a given region. This is normally called the point-inpolygon (PIP) problem. Within the Geodetic space, PIP queries have additional challenges that are not present in the Cartesian space. In this paper, we discuss several techniques implemented in Oracle Spatial to speed up geodetic PIP query processing. Our experiments utilizing real-world data sets demonstrate the PIP query performance can be significantly improved using these new techniques.