Applying Oracle Spatial to a Very Large Insurance Problem
Location Intelligence has published an article on how Farallon Geographics used Oracle Spatial 10g to geo-process over 300,000,000 records to develp a set of insurance risk factors for ISO Innovative Analytics.
Farallon Geographics looked at several possibilities such as developing software in-house, using a traditional GIS or using a spatial RDBMS. An in-house software development program would not be as time efficient and could exceed the budget for the project. Using a traditional GIS would require not only the GIS but also an adjacent database to store and retrieve data. A spatial database that was of industrial strength, such as Oracle, made the most sense in this case.
Oracle Spatial 10g was selected because it could handle a lot of data and allow the data to be accessed by other systems (including GIS systems, query languages and APIs). It also offered server side geoprocessing and could accommodate the SAS used by ISO for standard analytics.