Uninstalling Oracle Spatial

[Anonymous User]

Original User: nsridb

Over the last few years we have been using ArcSDE on an Oracle RDBMS to hold our spatial data. I am the DBA for this system and it was my understanding that we weren't using Oracle Spatial as we don't have a licence for it and thus we have always done all our Spatial work using ArcSDE clients.

It now transpires that at some point in the past someone installed Oracle Spatial on the server and it appears that the default dbtune keyword uses the SDO_GEOMETRY storage type. It is difficult to determine exactly which of our tables/maps are affected or not.

We need to uninstall the Oracle Spatial from our server. Can anyone advice me what would be the implications of this? Is there any easy way of converting all the SDO_CEOMETRYS to ST_GEOMETRY? or will I have to export all the maps, change the dbtune geometry storage instructions and reload all the maps and then uninstall Oracle Spatial once we are sure none of the maps are using the SDO_GEOMETRY structure.

Any help gratefully received.

Caroline

[Anonymous User]

Original User: nsridb

I think we may have just made a break through. We think what we had installed before was Oracle Locator which had come with Multimedia and it is that which we have been using to store our maps using the SDO_GEOMETRY type and we never really had Oracle Spatial installed after all (which was always my understanding).

Can any of you confirm a table or package that I can check on which only comes with Oracle Spatial rather than Oracle Locator so I can confirm that we didn't have Oracle Spatial installed after all at least on the original servers before the last upgrade.

I think my systems chap did install Oracle Spatial by mistake during our latest upgrade to Oracle 11g a few weeks ago but thankfully Oracle have a script mddins.sql which will remove only those bits which are required by Oracle Spatial and leave all the Locator parts intact.

Hopefully this will work and we can leave all our maps well alone, as trying to convert them was proving to be a nightmare with new errors cropping up at every turn.

Caroline

[Anonymous User]

Original User: nsridb

Well I think the saga has at last come to an end. The conclusion being we don't actually have Oracle Spatial installed after all. So I have just spent a whole week trying to work out how to deinstall something that didn't exist.


Running the following command proved we don't have spatial installed:

select comp_name, version, status from dba_registry where comp_name='Spatial';


The week wasn't a complete waste of time as I think I learnt a lot but oh boy am I glad we can go back to business as usual.

Caroline