Oracle Spatial User's Guide and Reference - InfoLab

3.1 Bulk Loading
3
Loading Spatial Data
This chapter describes how to load spatial data into a database, including storing
the data in a table with a column of type SDO_GEOMETRY. After you have loaded
spatial data, you can create a spatial index for it and perform queries on it, as
described in Chapter 4.
The process of loading data can be classified into two categories:
■ Bulk loading of data (see Section 3.1)
This process is used to load large volumes of data into the database and uses
the SQL*Loader utility to load the data.
■ Transactional insert operations (see Section 3.2)
This process is used to insert relatively small amounts of data into the database
using the INSERT statement in SQL.
Bulk loading can import large amounts of ASCII data into an Oracle database. Bulk
loading is accomplished with the SQL*Loader utility. (For information about
SQL*Loader, see Oracle Database Utilities.)
3.1.1 Bulk Loading SDO_GEOMETRY Objects
Example 3–1 is the SQL*Loader control file for loading four geometries. When this
control file is used with SQL*Loader, it loads the same cola market geometries that
are inserted using SQL statements in Example 2–1 in Section 2.1.
Example 3–1 Control File for a Bulk Load of Cola Market Geometries
LOAD DATA
Loading Spatial Data 3-1