The Consistency of Relational Database and Object-Relational Database in GIS Applications

This final year project involves a research and a simple Geographical Information
System (GIS) application that will show GIS, spatial data, spatial database management,
which focused on relational and object-relational database management system. The
main objectives of this project is to study and gain deeper understanding on the
implementation of the two types of databases in GIS applications, to compare the level
of performance between the databases in a GIS application and to determine the most
suggested database to be implemented in a GIS application. The scope of the study will
focus on integrating a GIS application that implements Malacca spatial database with
two different database management system, namely relational database and objectrelational
database system. The performance of each database system will be identified
and compared. Rapid Development environment methodology will be utilized in the
research on the performance of relational and object-relational databases in GIS
applications and also in the development of an application that will implement the
database with GIS applications. This methodology basically involved overlapping
Planning, Analysis, Design and Implementation phases. Database development design
process involved conceptual, logical and physical design stages. This report also
includes discussions on the consistency of relational database as well as of the objectrelational
database in GIS applications. This report suggests GIS application developer
to choose object-relational database in order to manage both spatial and attributes data
for the applications efficiently. Furthermore, the result from the object-relational
database will be more consistent and reliable compared to a relational database and the
performance is better. Recommendations for continuing this project are to compare and
determine the level of consistency between relational database and object-relational
database in World Wide Web environment or with multi-user accessing the database
concurrently in order to study on the effects to the level of consistency and also to
develop a map query interface.