Monday, October 19. 2009

Governor Schwarzenegger Praises Takai, GIS at Oracle OpenWorld

Remember, it's an election year! The governor noted:

IT infrastructure was stale and it was outdated, so I hired Teri Takai, who was the head of IT in Michigan and made Michigan be the number one in IT, and we now are moving our way up. First we were not even in the top 20 percent — in the top 20 — now we — then we moved to 15th, then to tenth, now we’re in the top five, and within the next few years we will be also number one in this particular area. So as she – (Applause)

The perfect example of the progress that we’re making is if you look at GIS, which is the Geographic Information Systems — I’ve seen that firsthand. GIS is a form of digital mapping technology that our fire departments are now using. So many times when there are big fires, people are wondering why did they have helicopters, you know, at the airport, and why are they not taking off and dumping fire retardant? Well, when there is a lot of fire and there is a lot of smoke and no wind, they cannot see the ground, and therefore they cannot go and dump the fire retardant at that time. They’re waiting for a little wind to take that smoke away.

But now through this technology, digital mapping technology, our fire departments are using this continuously and through big firestorms it allows firefighters to see through that smoke, giving them more accurate and realtime view of the conditions on the ground. Think for a second about the awesome power of this technology. That information could quite literally make the difference between life and death, make the difference between a home burning or not. And like I said, I’ve seen it firsthand, the kind of advantages that the fire departments have. And of course, California’s — we have already the best trained and the most courageous firefighters in the world, but with the great technology that they have it makes them literally the best in the world. There’s no two ways about that.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Oracle at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Monday, September 14. 2009

NZ's Second Biggest Power Company Removes Oracle, Goes SQL Server

New Zealand’s Powerco pretty much removed its Oracle instances in favor of Microsoft’s SQL Server. There were also changes in hardware, virtualization and a drop in the number of Citrix servers. The GIS moves over this week; hopefully after a user presentation at Tech Ed, we'll learn more about how the company was using Oracle and how it'll be using SQL Server for spatial data (or not). The company uses Televent Miner and Miner apps built on ESRI tech (source). The money saved: $390,000 a year.

Open source was not considered as the goal was to standardize to one system from a mixed Oracle/SQL Server solution.

- Computerworld NZ

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Open Source, Microsoft, Oracle at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, September 1. 2009

Podcast: OGC Gets into Real Estate, DigitalGlobe Readies Bird for Daily Revisits

Our editors ask: Why is the Open Geospatial Consortium hooking up with the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate and what should potential users of DigitalGlobe's Worldview-2 satellite data be pondering before its launch planned for October?

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Oracle, Standards, Remote Sensing, Sensors, Directions on the News Podcast, DigitalGlobe, Geospatial Business, Satellite Imagery, Google Earth, Cloud Computing at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, July 21. 2009

Oracle Hikes Oracle Spatial Price: Why? Success of Google Maps and ESRI

Of interest to the geospatial community: "the price of its spatial database pack for the management of location-based data from US$11,500 to US$17,500" between June 2008 and June 2009. Also up: database diagnostic packs, database tuning packs and database configuration management packs which went from US$3500 to US$5000.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Oracle, Geospatial Business at 10:01 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, June 9. 2009

Podcast: Spatial Databases: A Commodity?

This week's question: Is the spatial database a commodity? With all the big database players storing and querying spatial data and several open source offerings in the market, is spatial no longer special when in comes to the database world? Is it time to "stop getting excited" about the addition of spatial support and simply use the technology?


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Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Open Source, Microsoft, Oracle, Databases, Directions on the News Podcast, Geospatial Business at 01:00 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

Thursday, May 14. 2009

Oracle, DigitalGlobe To Offer Imagery Service

Update: (Adena here) For those who note a PR on this topic from 2007, Joe assured me it's something different. I sent him that very link!

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After the IPO this morning of DigitalGlobe (DGI), news was available that the company will offer an imagery service with the next release of Oracle Spatial similar to the service that Oracle has with NAVTEQ. Users will be able to injest imagery data into Oracle Spatial and a 60-day trial license made available to try data. More details later.

Posted by Joe Francica in Oracle, Remote Sensing, DigitalGlobe at 09:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |