Spatial Databases: A Tour by Shashi Shekhar and Sanjay Chawla is a new addition to the Esri GIS bookstore and catalog. This book meets an interdisciplinary need for a comprehensive text on spatial database management systems, which are becoming critical for managing large spatial data sets in GIS, CAD, multimedia systems, and their application domains.

Spatial Databases: A Tour is a valuable resource for both practitioners and students. It provides a comprehensive yet concise overview of techniques to model, store, query, and analyze spatial data sets using database management systems. This interdisciplinary book helps readers master various stages of traditional spatial database design and implementation, introducing conceptual models (e.g., pictogram enhanced entity relationship diagrams), explaining query languages (e.g., OGIS, SQL3), and describing efficient storage and indexing methods (e.g., R-trees).

Fred Petry from Tulane University says, "This volume, by surveying GIS and database topics, allows it to be a stand-alone reference. There is really nothing else on the market, and it is a valuable and important area. It follows a good progression of topics and builds on previous chapters. Good coverage on indexing; good examples for querying."

Unique features of Spatial Databases: A Tour include full chapters on spatial data mining, an emerging area related to spatial analysis as well as spatial networks, arguably among the fastest growing application domains of GIS. Content of each chapter balances current industrial practices with research trends that are likely to shape the spatial database software offerings for the coming years.

Alia I. Abelmoty, University of Glamorgan, Wales, United Kingdom, says that this book "is up-to-date and provides a single reference for the topic, which otherwise gets dispersed in other books and papers."

A foreword from Professor Michael F. Goodchild of the University of California, Santa Barbara, says, "Spatial Databases: A Tour provides an up-to-date coverage of the classical themes of data modeling, query languages, and spatial indexing along with the increasingly important themes of spatial networks and spatial data mining. This book will help bridge the gap between computer scientists and GIS professionals."

Spatial Databases: A Tour is coauthored by Shashi Shekhar (professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota) and Sanjay Chawla (a faculty member in computer science at the University of Sydney). It is published by Prentice Hall (ISBN 013-017480-7).

For more information, visit the author's Web site (www.cs.umn.edu/research/shashi-group/Book) and Prentice Hall's Web site (www.prenhall.com) or purchase at www.esri.com/shop on the Web.