Monet And Its Geographic Extensions: A Novel Approach to High Performance GIS Processing

Overview: Monet is an extensible (relational) database system. The authors implemented a set of GIS extension modules (Point, Box and Polygon) to demonstrate their approach and its applicability to GIS databases.

Features:

• Decomposed Storage Model (DSM)
  • Involves the decomposition of all relations into binary (association) tables, one for each attribute in the original relation
• Main memory dbs
• Algebra-extensible
• Shared-memory parallelism
  • All processes share the same memory (or address) space

Concerns:

• Main memory:
  • Can even large raster databases fit into main memory as required by Monet?
  • For example, the authors state that they "did not have sufficient disk space to generate all 130 rasters for the National benchmark" (Section 5)
• What about raster data? Are there any modules for it?

• What's a database hot-set?
• What are typical sizes for GIS dbs? Raster files? Vector files?

Reference: Peter A. Boncz, Wilko Quak, Martin L. Kersten: Monet And Its Geographic Extensions: A Novel Approach to High Performance GIS Processing. EDBT 1996: 147-163

-- AprilWebster - 21 Feb 2007