| RDB 2

RDB 2 Documentation

# Introduction

The RIEGL RDB library offers tools to efficiently organize, compress and store point clouds.

# Features

- Point cloud is stored in a single indexed and compressed file
- Variable number of point attributes (dimensions)
- Dynamic point cloud, i.e. insert, remove or update points at any time
- Flexible point query function that allows to
  - specify simple point attribute filters (similar to SQL's WHERE clause)
  - read points into 8/16/32/64 bit integer or 32/64 bit floating point data buffers with on-the-fly data type conversion
  - read points into array- or record-like data containers
- Multiple coarse representations of the original point cloud for fast 3D visualization (level of detail)
- Block-oriented algorithms to support large number of points
- Log point cloud modifications to journal (transaction log)

# Interface

The core library has a C-style interface (API). The RDB SDK contains client side wrappers for following programming languages:

- C
- C++
- Pascal (Delphi)
- Python

The interface files for each language can be found in a separate sub-folder in the "interface" folder of the RDB SDK.

# Documentation

The best point to start at is to have a look on the class riegl::rdb::Pointcloud which is the main database management and access class.

Remarks
  This documentation only covers the C++ interface - all other interfaces are very similar. Details about other language interfaces can be found in the corresponding interface (header) files.

Note
  All strings are expected to be UTF-8 encoded.

Warning
  Thread-Safety: Accessing the same instance of riegl::rdb::Context, riegl::rdb::Pointcloud or riegl::rdb::pointcloud::PointAttribute from multiple threads at the same time is not safe, no matter if accessing the instance through its methods directly or indirectly (e.g. through any of the 'Query' classes). You either must ensure that only one thread accesses the point cloud (and thus the context) at a time or use multiple different instances of riegl::rdb::Context and riegl::rdb::Pointcloud and open the same database file. See also documentation of class riegl::rdb::Pointcloud, especially for the constructor.

# Examples

C++ example code can be found on the "Examples" page.

# License

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License terms of the libraries the RIEGL RDB library is based on see folder "manual/licenses".