GFDRR Open Source Mentoring Guide
Spatial Databases allow you to store spatial geometries as attributes in a database table and perform operations with them. They provide a set of extensions thatallow you to create spatially enabled tables, build geometry based indexes on these tables to improve performance and a set of functions for manipulating geometries, performing analysis with them or converting between types and formats. This module will only cover PostGIS which is the spatial extension for the PostgreSQL database, but most of the same principles are applicable to other spatial databases like Oracle Spatial, Esri ArcSDE and others.