Spatial data

Netezza Performance Server provides two spatial cartridges, each of which provides a set of functions that let you analyze questions regarding spatial data, such as the sizes of, distances between, and intersections among geometries.

Spatial

The Spatial cartridge supports only simple geometries. Also, when using the Spatial cartridge, spatial functions can use only the following SRIDs, and not all functions can use all of these SRIDs:

4326 (WGS84)
1111 (Spherical)
1234 (Cartesian)

Spatial ESRI

The Spatial ESRI cartridge supports both simple geometries and non-simple geometries, and can use all SRIDs.

The spatial functions of both cartridges follow the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) OpenGIS standards as documented in the OpenGIS Implementation Specification for Geographic Information - Simple Feature Access - Part 1: Common Architecture 1.2.0 and the ISO19107 & ISO13249-3:2006 – SQL Multimedia and Application Packages – Part 3 – Spatial 3rd Ed.

The OpenGIS framework is geared toward user-defined methods on custom Datatypes. By comparison, Netezza Performance Server uses a more standard ANSI SQL function style of syntax, where user-defined functions (UDFs) are used instead with the first parameter representing the object for which the method is to be applied. For example, to find the area of an ST_Polygon object in column A of the counties table using OpenGIS, issue the following SQL query:

SELECT A.ST_Area() FROM counties;

To do the same thing using the Netezza Performance Server Spatial cartridge, issue the following SQL query:

SELECT ST_Area(A) FROM counties;