Spatial DB in Box
February 27th, 2005 | Published in Code Development
David Blasby, the new maintainer of GeoServer, has had a pretty keen idea - why, he reckons, shouldn’t all databases have spatial geometry columns, operations, and indexes, rather than just the usual suspects, like Oracle, PostgreSQL, and so on. He’s hacked a wrapper around the Java Topology Suite (the precursor to Refractions’s excellent GEOS library, which PostGIS uses) with libgcj, and voilá — it’s a Spatial Database in a Box. Currently, there’s support for Apache’s Derby (aka IBM’s Cloudscape), PostgreSQL and HSQLDB, a Java database engine. Personally, I’d like to see an SQLite port, as well. Although this project is still at a very embryonic stage, it’s interesting to see the idea of spatial databasing abstracted out in a way that can be put to use on more and different platforms, like embedded systems, for example. We’ll be watching this one.
Beginning to collect issues related to geo coding and the like, for a project…
(Via Mapping Hacks.)
