At Oracle Open World in San Francisco 2014, September 28–October 2 the Oracle Spatial and Graph SIG held a Meetup.  By way of background Oracle Spatial and Graph support geospatial data and analytics for land management and GIS, mobile location services, sales territory management, transportation, LiDAR analysis and location-enabled Business Intelligence. The graph features include RDF graphs for applications ranging from semantic data integration to social network analysis to linked open data and network graphs used in transportation, utilities, energy and telcos and drive-time analysis for sales and marketing applications.  

There were several very interesting discussions at the Meetup that revealed some interesting aspects of Oracle Spatial itselef and its interoperability with other products such as ESRI ArcGIS, Autodesk Map3D, and Bentley.  These are taken from a summary recorded by Nick Salem moderator of the Meetup.

The Meetup was attended by about 20 users came from industries such as rail, local city government, national land management agencies, and defense. The SIG Board and members of the Oracle Spatial product development team joined up with them in the Oracle Technology Network Lounge.

Some of the most interesting discussion topics include new features in Oracle Spatial 12c and real world experience interoperating Oracle Spatial with CAD and GIS products from other vendors.

• Oracle’s new Database Cloud Service offering now includes Spatial. 
• A new Oracle Spatial 12c SDO_POINTINPOLYGON function can be used to ingest large point datasets (point clouds) without the overhead of creating a spatial index.
• Bechtel has developed a way to use ESRI ArcGIS versioning with Oracle Workspace Manager (OWM).  They have developed in-house custom tools to usefeature-level metadata to be able to retrieve spatial content from their project and public spatial databases, as well as to compile the revision history of layers in the database to retrieve maps impacted by changes to individual features.
• Dan Geringer, Oracle Spatial Solutions Architect, advised that other large enterprises have also successfully implemented OWM with ESRI ArcGIS.
• Bulk processing and interoperability are two of the important advantages of Oracle Spatial for enterprises. Bechtel has large project-based deployments of Autodesk and Bentley CAD systems, and has worked with Autodesk in recent years to successfully write spatial data to their Enterprise GIS Oracle Spatial database from Autodesk Map 3D. They also have developed a GIS Desktop Procedure that details the required Autodesk client software configuration for Oracle Spatial and ESRI ArcSDE database connections. They will be updating it for use with Autodesk 2014 and 2015 clients.
• Latest version of MapViewer (11.1.1.7) supports HTML5 and JSon and the ability to work in disconnected mode. Standalone, web-based vector editing is also available. Wish Li and Jayant Sharma demonstrated  MapViewer on mobile devices, an Android phone and an iPad.