enterprise geodatabase - Selecting the SHAPE column in Toad

I've noticed that SQL clients select the SHAPE column from SDE.ST_GEOMETRY in different ways:

select shape from roads 

• Toad: SDE.ST_GEOMETRY(1,1,666666.0,4444444.5,666666.0,4444444.5,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,0,300051,(BLOB))


• SQL Developer: [SDE.ST_GEOMETRY]


• MS Access: Error: Invalid field definition 'SHAPE' in definition of index or relationship. (I know MS Access isn't a real SQL client; but it helps demonstrate the point.)

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Question:

What does the text that is returned from Toad represent? Is it the properties of the blob?

Answer

TOAD writes out the meta data of Oracles ST_GEOMETRY UDT implementation for ESRIs SDE; it's essentially a list of geometric predicates describing the geometry, and the vertex array that builds the geometry type, held as BLOB:

ST_GEOMETRY(
  ,    -- geometry type (POINT, LINESTRING, ...)
  ,    -- number of points
  ,      -- coordinates of the envelope (bbox)
  ,      -- ^
  ,      -- ^
  ,      -- ^

  ,      -- range of Z values
  ,      -- ^
  ,      -- range of M values
  ,      -- ^
  ,      -- area in CRS units (if any)
  ,       -- length in CRS units (if any)
  ,      -- CRS identifier
   -- vertex storage
)

as described in detail in ST_Geometry storage in Oracle.