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Spatial databases
With a typical relational database you load your data, then open the data in your GIS, make some selections to get the particular information you wish to work with and then have to store that subset of data for future use. For example you open your data table of all the clients you have in the state from an Access database, then select those in your county and save them out as a local file. A Spatial Database enables you to perform many of the basic GIS operations within the database- you can setup a view that tells the database to pull out only records that fall within a particular boundary. This greatly helps in managing files- we do not need a copy of the clients for every different area we work in or a set of files for the different counties we work in- we just load them all in our spatial database and write very simple SQL queries to tell the system what data we want and how it shoudl select it. Very efficient and very powerful yet not too hard to get up and running. The main players are described below.
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Oracle has had a spatial extension since version 8i. Currently at version 11g, their spatial database extension is powerful but intimidating.
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PostGIS is an extension to the open source PostgreSQL database- a mature platform that offers a variety of implementations and is very common on the web in general.
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MySQL is a long established open source relational database that is used by a majority of websites out there.
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ArcSDE is a middleware component to enable ESRIs ArcGIS products to connect to a relational database.
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