Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies FOSS4G Cape Town 1 A spatial DBMS buyer’s guide Wim de Haas - RWS Wilko Quak - TUDelft Maarten Vermeij - TUDelft

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Overview Short CV Example: A camera buyer’s guide Towards a spatial DBMS c Discussion

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Background 1994: PhD student in spatial DBMS performance 1995: Wrote spatial extension to MonetDB (was fastest in the world back then) 2000-now: work at GIS-technology department and test various DBMS for various reasons: Products: Ingres, Oracle, Oracle topology, Oracle Point Cloud, Informix, PostGIS, MySQL, ArcSDE, … Datasets: Cadastral, Laser Scanning Points, GPS logs, road maintenance data.

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Example: A camera buyer’s guide Figure out your profile Check out the specs that matter Use feature matrix

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Towards a spatial DBMS buyer’s guide? Buyer’s Guide (does not exist) Feature Matrix: Last version compares only (SQLServer, MySQL and PostGIS. Based on documentation and not verified

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Let’s write a ‘buyer’s’ guide: 1.Make categories of users: Done: FOSS4G2007: Server Builders, GIS Users, Dataset Maintainer, Power User 2.Figure out relevant feature for each category: Todo: See rest of presentation 3.Fill feature matrix: Continuous JOB: For community?

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Buyer’s guide Feature list Functionality Performance Ease of Use Documentation Hardware needs Total Cost of Ownership Integration in business environment Scaleability Open Source vs Closed Source

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Functionality Check the documentation. Run cross check or test: Same co-ordinate transformation gives meters of difference

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Performance (= benchmarking) Not as important as you would expect In most cases performance is not an issue Moore’s law helps a lot

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Ease of Use For 1 day of consultancy to improve performance you can buy a lot of hardware! A cumbersome system is not fun: A self organizing DBMS might save a lot of work: Adherance to standards saves time (Learn another dialect of SQL, Please: polygons in WKT) Readable documentation helps

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Documentation PostGIS Oracle

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Total Cost of Ownership Open Source = free Cost for support Hard to find support staff

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Integration How well does the DBMS integrate with other products: SOAP JDBC Hibernate The rest of the GIS stack

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Scaleability Very hard to predict without testing. Most functions look like this: There is a breakpoint here There might be another breakpoint here

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Open Source or not? Vendor Lock-in is EVERYWHERE:

OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies Spatial DBMS Buyer's Guide Discussion