Customer Relationship Management and Location Based Services with Oracle Spatial Database

Abstract

A spatial database is a database that is optimized to store and query data related to objects in space, including points, lines and polygons. While typical databases can understand various numeric and character types of data, additional functionality needs to be added for databases to process spatial data types. We have the various applications for spatial database such as Mapmaking, Cartography, Emergency response planning, Urban development, Public transportation monitoring, Location-based services, Crime tracking and route planning.These applications can be solved by the GIS tools in the earlier days. Retrieving the information from GIS tools is very slow because no spatial indexing is used. In GIS tools are the loosely coupled system and have a poor integration between the third party tools and traditional DBMS. We have used introduced the Oracle Spatial features of oracle 10g. It capable to handle all types of spatial data with efficient manner and above mentioned applications can be solved by using oracle spatial database. It supports GIS tools and uses the integrated system (Single Architecture), it is fully integrated with GIS tools and database applications. We can also use oracle spatial for location analysis without using the GIS tools. In oracle spatial, the SDO_GEOMETRY object type is used to store the different geometric shapes, geographic data and related space. It uses the indexing technique to make the working more fast and efficient. To analyze the spatial data, it supports the spatial operators and spatial functions. The spatial operators are useful in proximity analysis, distance based analysis and intersection based analysis. The spatial functions are used to perform the calculations on geometries such as area of polygon and length of the geometry. It also supports the concepts of Network Modeling, Raster, Spatial Data Mining, Geocoder, 3D Types, Web Services and so on. In thesis we identified problems in the areas of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Location Based Services (LBS) as application systems. The problems of CRM system like find area of sensitive customers which exist in those regions where our iv competitors are also operating, find the closest customers from the location of a specific retail store are solved and implemented with oracle spatial database. The problems of LBS system like find the marketing area to buy all different types of products in only place, find marketing areas of products from specified region within distance of 2 or 5 miles and find the marketing area of products having no competitors are solved and implemented with oracle spatial database.