NAVIGATE was the first GIS organisation to actively support Oracle Spatial in the Asia/Pacific region with an assignment for the Department of Defence performing integration testing between Oracle V7 and ESRI SDE V3. We have a very good relationship with the Oracle Spatial development group as a result. We are members of the Early Adopters Program for Oracle Spatial and receive software direct from the Oracle research labs in Nashua, Hew Hampshire, USA. We are also one of the very few organisations to be invited to the international Oracle Spatial 9i and 10i Beta programmes.

We have been used by Oracle Australia in their spatial database tender responses and we are actively developing Oracle Spatial databases and systems for a number of clients as well as in our in house laboratory where we use the product to manage and process our PSMA and Business Intelligence data products.

 In addition to the advantages inherent in being able to use database tools for geospatial data management, Oracle Spatial is unique in that all the GIS application vendors are creating interfaces that enable their particular products to use the database structures. Being one of the first organisations in the region to investigate and use the spatial DBMS software, we are uniquely placed to advise and develop Oracle Spatial applications with the many GIS client products that are on the market today. In recent times we have been called upon by a number of organisations to advise and build systems where there is a history of GIS with a vendor product and who are now looking to expand the scale of their geospatial database operations.

 Our Oracle Spatial clients all run large databases and issues relating to the efficient management of data at such a scale are not only spatially related. Oracle is a complex product and extensive knowledge and experience is required to make the software and query operations run in an optimum manner.

 Our skills and experience have also been recognised by Oracle in that we are the only organisation in the Asia/Pacific region approved to supply trainers to Oracle for their 9i Spatial courses. The current course structure includes a number of syntax hints and optimiser instructions that are not found in any of the User Manuals. However knowledge of these “tricks of the trade” can improve query performance by an order of magnitude or greater. All our staff have this knowledge of Oracle Spatial due to our in-house training.

Our Oracle Spatial clients include: OPTUS, AirServices Australia, Geoscience Australia, Gold Coast City Council, ACT Department of Urban Services, Australian Department of Defence, PSMA Australia, the ACT Land Information Centre, Hutchinson Australia, Santos, Raytheon, Vodaphone NZ, Kellogg Brown and Root, URS, Parramatta City Council, HLA Envirosciences, and PlanningNSW.