Storing Images and Surfaces within Spatial DBMS

Manifold provides two ways of storing images and surfaces within a DBMS:

Oracle GeoRaster - Connecting via OCI (Oracle's native Oracle Call Interface) to an Oracle database that has GeoRaster capability (Oracle Spatial or Oracle Enterprise) allows us to store images within Oracle's native GeoRaster data type. See the Example: Storing an Image in Oracle topic.

Generic image storage: Connecting via ODBC or OLE DB to almost any DBMS that allows binary storage allows us to store images and surfaces (which are stored as images with an additional Height channel). Images are stored as tiles, with the export process allowing choice of a tile size. Exporting an image to such a data source creates a table with a record for each image tile. Image tiles are stored in compressed or uncompressed BGRA format. Importing or linking images from such a data source automatically reassembles tiles. Surfaces cannot be linked, but can be imported by importing the Height channel of the image that is stored for them into the database. See the Example: Storing an Image in Manifold Spatial DBMS and Example: Storing a Surface in Manifold Spatial DBMS topics.

Manifold uses Database Console to connect to a database storing images to import or link to a stored image. Database console will recognize tables containing image tiles and will display them as images, allowing us to import or link to the image by using the database console's Import or Link buttons. We can also import individual channels of such images as surfaces.