Wednesday, February 4. 2009

MySQL Spatial...Finally Some News

It always amazed me that more attention was not given to the spatial functionality of MySQL. Every time a newsletter arrived from the MySQL folks I looked for recent functionality updates. Finally, some mention of what's going on was provided in a recent note about the upcoming MySQL Conference in Santa Clara in April. A session on by John Powell of eMapSite entitled "Spatial SQL-Who needs a traditional GIS?" will be on the conference program.

For a closer look at some of the new MySQL Spatial features, see the MySQL Forge website.

Posted by Joe Francica in Databases at 07:48 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Wednesday, October 29. 2008

Netezza Appliance "Visited"

We've written before on the Netezza data warehouse appliance that supports the OGC simple feature specifications and hopes to offer clients exceedingly fast performance with high volumes of data (think terabytes). So,  on the exhibit floor of the GEOINT Symposium I got an up-close look at the basic device. If you've taken apart a deskside computer you'd recognize that it has the same basic components: a hard drive, processor and memory. What would be new is the "secret sauce," a silicon chip with the embedded proprietary logic to strip out certain extraneous bytes such as SQL statements and simply use the location-based data. This firmware approach to dealing with the complexities of massive amounts of data is amplied when these simple sleaves of hardware are rack mounted - 120 fold. The Netezza appliance is composed of 120 such devices described above in the company's Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing architecture. According to their literature on Netezza Spatial "each intelligent node...is an independent computer optimized specifically to accelerate analytic query performance on large data volumes."

The argument about whether you replace an Oracle Spatial or ArcSDE may be a question for some but it may not be an either/or situation. Netezza will first process the data using the ETL functions of Safe's FME which loads the spatial data into its firmware so it can bypass a typical database but many users have found an approach that works in tandem.

Posted by Joe Francica in Databases, Location Intelligence at 06:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Wednesday, October 1. 2008

Where is Spatial at MySQL?

I regularly get the MySQL monthly newsletter and I always look to see what's up with support for spatial data. There is never much to be found. This month, there is an announcement about a call for papers for the 2009 MySQL conference. And in the list of suggested topics, I expected to see something about spatial. No such luck. The question is, why? Here is the leading open source database that supports spatial data primitives and not a word about it for their conference. Location technology and spatial data support is no longer sequestered to the back room. It's front and center in BI, LBS, and enterprise computing. It should be one of the key topics at the MySQL conference. I expect many attendees would want to know what's going on. Let's hope that Sun (now owners of MySQL) and O'Reilly (conference organizers) make an effort to include spatial in the future.

Posted by Joe Francica in Databases at 07:52 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, September 23. 2008

Podcast: Spatially-enabled Data Warehouse Appliances

This week two different vendors, Netezza and Teradata announced spatial extensions for their data warehouse appliances. Our editors explain the new offerings and explore what questions they prompt for geospatial practitioners and well as traditional database administrators. Is one of these solutions in your future?

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Posted by Adena Schutzberg in LBS, Remote Sensing, Databases, Podcasts, Directions on the News Podcast, IBM, Geospatial Business at 01:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Friday, September 12. 2008

Netezza to Announce Spatial Extension to Data Warehouse Appliance

We in the geospatial world have over the past decade or so wrapped our brains around spatial extensions for databases. I’m the first to admit, it took me quite a bit of time to get used to the idea that geometry was just another field like data and number. Now we are sort of blase about yet another database adding a geospatial type. That’s good because I need to blow your mind just a little.

Next week Netezza a data warehouse appliance company will announce its spatial extension to its database. “It has a database?”you ask. “I’ve never heard of it.” You and me both! But I spoke to Jonathan Shepherd, who heads the geospatial initiative at Netezza, who gave me the lowdown. Peter Batty was also on the call. He's been hinting at this for a while.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in PBBI [MapInfo], Intergraph, Databases at 14:26 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, July 8. 2008

Podcast: Web Mapping Platform Migration

Last week Ask.com moved off its longtime mapping platform to Microsoft's Virtual Earth. What are the practical choices these days for those who want mapping as part of their portals? Has customization and a unique look and feel been overshadowed by a few strong hosted solutions to which everyone will eventually migrate? Our editors sort out the options and trends and end up using the "c" word - commodity.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, ESRI, Open Source, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, PBBI [MapInfo], Databases, Directions on the News Podcast, MapQuest, IBM, Geospatial Business at 01:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |