[OSGeo-Discuss] Enterprise OSDB for OSGIS

[Arnulf Christl]

On Tue, December 12, 2006 02:41, chenrg at lreis.ac.cn wrote:
> Thank you very much, Frank,
> PostGIS is very promising. We've tested it with ArcSDE and Oracle Spatial.
> Its spatial query performance is equivalent to ArcSDE, and much better
> than Oracle Spatial. Its spatial processing (such as intersection, union)
> performance is better than Oracle Spatial, but has a big gap comparing to
> ArcSDE due to the GEOS's poor performance (The test showed that GRASS is
> very good at spatial processing).  We're considering to propose a new
> benchmark for spatial DBMS (The Sequoia 2000 and Paradise benchmark are
> quite old ones). The effectiveness of the benchmark will be demonstrated
> using a variety of spatial queries over a 10-100GB spatial data in five
> example DBMSs including the commercial ones such as Oracle Spatial, IBM
> DB2 Spatial extender and ESRI ArcSDE and the open source ones such as
> PostGIS/PostgreSQL and MySQL Spatial extensions. And we have plan to do

Prof. Chen,
please be aware that the use of the term "commercial" is not opposed to
"Open Source", in fact all Open Source software can and is also used in
commercial enterprises and environments. The correct terms to
differentiate the development methodology are "Open" vs. "closed" source
and with respect to licensing "Free" vs. "proprietary". Sorry to be
insistent on this but we have to be clear on this definition else our
precious Open Source software might appear to not be useful in a
commercial context which is not true.

Best regards and I am looking forward to your ambitious benchmarking,
Arnulf.

> some DBMS benchmark (TPC-C and AS3AP) tests. The targets will be Oracle,
> Ingres, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MaxDB and Firebird in Linux. The tools'll
> include Benchmark Factory for Databases from Quest(www.quest.com) and the
> ODBC Driver from OpenLink (www.openlinksw.com). If PostgreSQL + PostGIS
> performs well, we'll carry through our GRIDGIS project based on it.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Chen
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Frank Warmerdam" <warmerdam at pobox.com>
> To: <discuss at mail.osgeo.org>
> Cc: <chenrg at lreis.ac.cn>
> Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 11:26 PM
> Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Enterprise OSDB for OSGIS
>
>
>> chenrg at lreis.ac.cn wrote:
>>> Dear all,
>>> There are many comparisons about OSDBs, such as:
>>> http://www.geocities.com/mailsoftware42/db/
>>> http://www.fabalabs.org/research/papers/FabalabsResearchPaper-OSDBMS-Eval.pdf
>>> http://www.virtuas.com/files/osl-osrdb-01.pdf
>>> http://www.osdbmigration.org:8080/osdb/osdb-features
>>> I'm not sure which will be the most promising enterprise OSDB for
>>> OSGIS.
>>> (1) PostGIS is an excellent one, but its performance depends on
>>> PostgreSQL;
>>> (2) MySQL Spatial Extension (MyGIS) faces the same problem.
>>> Another solution is to build a Spatial Data Engine (like ArcSDE) for
>>> FireBird or MaxDB or Ingres.
>>> Checked the source codes of several OSDB:
>> ...
>>> It seems that Ingres is more powerful and has more enterprise
>>> functions.
>>> Further more, it has internal support for spatial extension.
>>> Is it a reasonable solution to choose it to build enterprise OSGIS? Any
>>> advice and suggestions?
>>
>> Prof. Chen,
>>
>> I reviewed the helpful document you referenced at:
>>
>>   http://www.osdbmigration.org:8080/osdb/osdb-features
>>
>> And from this it did not seem clear that Ingres was substantially more
>> powerful than PostgreSQL.  In that matrix it seems that PostgreSQL
>> compared fairly well on the various enterprise features listed.  I'm
>> afraid I did not have time to review all the other documents.
>>
>> You mention that PostGIS is excellent, but that its performance
>> depends on PostgreSQL.  Is that a problem?  It has been my (limited)
>> experience that a well tuned postgres performs well compared to other
>> enterprise class commercial databases, though it sometimes performs
>> less well than very performance focused databases like MySQL.
>>
>> MySQL is a promising player in the geospatial osdb space, and I was
>> pleased to see their addition of limited OGC simple features support.
>> But, in my opinion, MySQL is a stretch to refer to as "enterprise
>> class" in the terms the document above lists.  Also, it's spatial
>> support is quite limited by comparison to PostGIS.
>>
>> I am not really familiar with the other databases listed.
>>
>> My main point though is that usefulness and success in the open source
>> community is in significant part about the healthiness of the ecosystem
>> around a project.  That is, the number of users and contributors and
>> the
>> number of people knowledgeable about the product.  Also, the
>> helpfulness
>> of on line resources such as mailing lists, irc channels, and web
>> sites.
>>
>> On that basis it seems to me that the only spatial open source database
>> with any significant mind-share and community is PostgreSQL+PostGIS.  I
>> am speaking from the spatial point of view of course.  I'm sure all the
>> databases have substantial users bases.  In the case of MySQL it also
>> has a substantial number of users in the geospatial space, though few
>> of those users are actually using the spatial extensions to mysql
>> (in my experience).
>>
>> So, if I were wanting to build out an enterprise class open source
>> spatial database system for an enterprise, I think I would start
>> by looking at PostgreSQL + PostGIS and only look further if I found
>> substantial inadequacies for my needs.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> --
>> ---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
>> I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam,
>> warmerdam at pobox.com
>> light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
>> and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo,
>> http://osgeo.org
>>
>>
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-- 
Arnulf Christl
http://www.ccgis.de