7 replies to this topic

[Hans van der Maarel]

I spent some time in the past week setting up a system to hold my collection of geographic data (which was spread out over various formats and directories). Decided on a spatial database for speed issues, and MySQL because it's free

Anyway, I wrote up a little essay on how and why I did this. Hopefully somebody finds this useful too.

[patdunlavey]

That's pretty cool Hans! Now I wish I had FME Pro!

[Hans van der Maarel]

That's pretty cool Hans! Now I wish I had FME Pro!

Did I mention I'm an FME reseller?

Just kidding I am pretty impressed with the results so far. I always thought a spatial database was going to be a big improvement in terms of processing speed, just never imagined it'd be this dramatic. Kinda makes me want to see what else I can do to make it even more useful. I have this vision of a huge collection of data (well, the VMAP stuff I have in there is 1.5 Gb at the moment, that's pretty massive) that I can easily pull selections from.

[Lui]

Hallo Hans!

Nice solution. I was thinking about this kind of database for a year now. Just a small question. Did you consider a PostgreSQL/PostGIS platform? It is also supported by FME isn't it?

Lui

[Hans van der Maarel]

Lui,

I tried, several times, to get PostgreSQL/PostGIS working through Cygwin and I seem to fail every time. Installation instructions say "A", my computer says "B"...

So I went with MySQL. I have to admit, I had that XAMPP setup already running for about 18 months to do local testing of my website and Google Maps stuff, so I knew that part was going to be easy. In general, I think you'll see this kind of dramatic performance increases with any kind of spatially enabled database. It's the indexing.

PostGIS is supported in FME Professional and up. I just had a quick look through the documentation and I think for the stuff that I'm describing, there's very little difference between PostGIS and MySQL.

Anyway, working on part 2 of this, stay tuned...

[Lui]

Lui,

I tried, several times, to get PostgreSQL/PostGIS working through Cygwin and I seem to fail every time. Installation instructions say "A", my computer says "B"...

PostgreSQL release 8 and up is Windows native so you don't need Cygwin enviroment to run it. It seems that Postgre handels large databases better.

I'm looking forward to read part 2...
Lui

[Hans van der Maarel]

PostgreSQL release 8 and up is Windows native so you don't need Cygwin enviroment to run it. It seems that Postgre handels large databases better.

I'll give it a look, never hurts to try something new.

I'm looking forward to read part 2...

It's up: A control interface to FME

The concept is simple enough: define an area of interest in Google Maps and have FME clip that out of a larger dataset.

[SerbanR]

Excellent tutorial!
thanks