Technical Letter: Managing Multi-DBMS on Single UI, A Web-Based Spatial DB Manager.

Abstract

In developing business systems based on spatial data, sometimes, system developers experience troubles with DB administrators. The DB administrators take it odd that query results from spatial DB are not text-formatted, and they hardly understand spatial indices.And, the developers carry on the developments without general understanding about management of DBMS. Such misunderstandings about each fields mainly cause troubles between them.Spatial data is also a kind of well refined data and this means that it can be also saved in, managed in, and queried from DBMS like others. In practice, most of DBMS support spatial data and you can query it through SQL with complex conditions. So, if a DB-handling tool which DB administrators are familiar with can support effectively spatial queries and developers can use the same tool so that they can understand overall DB mechanism and make necessary spatial queries in developments easily, it will help both groups collaborate with each other efficiently.And, major DBMS like Oracle, SQL Server, and etc, don't provide any tool to insert spatial data into the DB, so it even needs many steps of process to insert well-known formats of spatial data like ESRI Shape into the DB. In addition, you have to use suitable tools for each DBMS. These situations lay a tons of burden on both administrators and developers whenever multiple DBMS are necessary in a system or they should test on various DBMS.Tadpole SDM(Spatial DB Manager) is a tool, devised for both administrators and developers to manipulate DB efficiently. With Tadpole SDM, they can easily identify visually databases, tables, and columns in various DBMS like PostGIS, Oracle, SQL Server and etc, spatial distributions of data on maps, and query results of complex spatial queries. And, they can dump files of ESRI Shape into the DB and export spatial data in tables into files of SQL command set or ESRI Shape.