A part of every GIS is a database. A GIS is not feasible without one form of database, as it would merely be a digital map-drawing program. In order not simply to display and store spatial data, but also analyse and query it, spatial data and non-spatial data have to be stored in a formal and organised way. Historically within a GIS the spatial and non-spatial data has been handled separately. Spatial data was too complex to store in the prevailing data model, i.e. the relational data model, and spatial queries were not supported. Therefore spatial data handling was implemented outside the database. The feature attribute data held in the database does not have a spatial dimension in itself, but is given a dimension in space by association with the spatial feature. ArcInfo is probably the best-known software package to implement this structure.

Developments in database technology now allow for spatial objects to be be stored within a relational database. The project's spatial data is completely contained in Oracle Spatial®, resulting in spatial data being, in essence, treated as any other database data format, such as 'Varchar' or 'Number'.