Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Does MySQL GIS Make The Grade?

Bob Zurek of EnterpriseDB posted a blog entry today titled, "We slammed into a brick wall with MySQL". If you read his blog entry, the information he is referencing is in this press release, FortiusOne Migrates GeoCommons Intelligent Mapping Website to EnterpriseDB Advanced Server. If you read that press release, it says:
“We slammed into a brick wall with MySQL,” said Chris Ingrassia, chief technology officer, FortiusOne. “As an example, MySQL’s rather limited and incomplete spatial support dramatically impacted performance. We were looking for an affordable database solution, but we required enterprise-class features and performance that MySQL simply couldn’t deliver. Plus, philosophically we want to support open source-based technologies like EnterpriseDB.”
I'm not at all familiar with the MySQL GIS support and only remotely familiar with PostGIS (PostgreSQL GIS). Is MySQL GIS support lacking or was that particular application of MySQL GIS a bad fit? Anyone familiar with both? I'm curious as to how they compare. LewisC

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

As far as I know the MySQL GIS solution is somewhat limited. For example you can only check if something is contained inside a rectangle, but not if its contained within an arbitrary polygon.

Unknown said...

As Lukas writes, MySQL GIS support is not the best...

That said, someone else at MySQL had an interesting observation...

PostgreSQL's GIS support is licensed under the GPL. EnterpriseDB is not open source. If EnterpriseDB's GIS support is indeed the GPL-license PostGIS, then this looks like a fairly clear license violation.

http://www.postgis.org/

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I will try to figure out what is going on there. I checked on the EDB website and only found a link to a partner called microOLAP, who provide some GIS related tools. Anyways, I will hunt down some EnterpriseDB people to get this figure out.

LewisC said...

That's a good point. The licensing issue didn't even occur to me.

The press release specifically talks about PostGIS, though.

LewisC

Anonymous said...

I talked to Bruce from EDB and he told me that they ship PostGis with their product, but its not installed by default. So in essensce its like a Linux distro with proprietary applications. Only the other way around :)