Store additional shape information in non-geometry columns

Bud — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 11:54:22 GMT

Oracle (with either SDE.ST_GEOMETRY or SDO_GEOMETRY FCs in mind):

What are the options for storing additional shape information in a feature class?

With single-part point information, we can simply create X and Y numeric columns.
But what about lines, polygons, and multi-part points?

Since having multiple geometry columns in a FC isn't supported, what datatypes would be suitable for storing additional shape information columns? (The idea being, ArcGIS would ignore any datatypes it doesn't recognize, which isn't the case for true geometry columns; they cause known issues in ArcGIS — i.e. versioning.)

Some hypothetical ideas that come to mind (I could populate the columns via a trigger or, in some cases, attribute rules(?)):

SDO_GEOMETRY_ARRAY
MDSYS.VERTEX_SET_TYPE
Nested table column
OdciVarchar2List (varray)
A custom user-defined object type
SDO_ORDINATE_ARRAY (convert to text?)
WKT in a text column
JSON in a text column (or in a true JSON column)
- JSON, not GeoJSON, since the GeoJSON standard doesn't support M-enabled features.

Note: Storing text-based formats like WKT or JSON would work. But from testing, converting from WKT or JSON to SDO_GEOMETRY is a bit slower than I'd like. Even more so for converting WKT to SDE.ST_GEOMETRY.

I'm aware that there are alternatives like creating a separate/parallel FC to store additional true geometries. That would work, but the downside is that it requires adding dozens of new FCs to an already cluttered geodatabase. I want to explore what the alternative options are — as a learning exercise/experiment.

topic Store additional shape information in non-geometry columns in Geodatabase Questions

Store additional shape information in non-geometry columns