[OSM-dev] Anyone with a speedy gazetteer

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Nicolas Guillaumin wrote:
> Excuse me if it's a silly question (I'm a newbie here), but what about using
> a search engine component instead of SQL queries ?
> I think about Apache Lucene (Java search engine) for example (
> http://lucene.apache.org/) which seems to me a better solution about
> indexing and searching than SQL requests ?

Most of these are based on the concept of "documents" that are 
"searched", and they don't usually have a spatial component.

What we need is something that searches for objects in our database of 
roughly half a billion elements, ideally also doing things like "a near 
b", where position is expressed in coordinates.

It is not impossible that some of the existing engines could be tweaked 
to work but personally I think we're better of investing work in our own 
database.

Bye
Frederik