What Is the Feature Service?

The Feature Service provides the ability to search spatial databases. It provides a set of common operations that you can use to query content, regardless of the underlying data provider. The advantage of this is that you can run the exact same operation against many different content stores (such as a native TAB file, an Oracle database table, or a SQL Server database table) by specifying different named tables; the same query will work on each table type.

The Feature Service provides operations that:

• list all tables in the catalog
• describe specific tables in the catalog
• search within a distance, polygon or envelope
• search intersections of geometries and/or bounding boxes
• search within a polygon or bounding box
• search for the nearest feature or edge
• search using a custom MapInfo SQL query
• insert and update features into a database table

The Feature Service is configured and managed using Spectrum Spatial Manager. For more information, see Spectrum Spatial Manager under Managing Spatial in the Spectrum Spatial Guide.