[OSM-dev] First beta release of new OSM data storage for tile servers

[Robert Buchholz]

(cross-posting to the dev and tile-serving mailing lists)

COORDS is a new vector data storage backend for OSM tile servers. It is 
intended to some day replace Postgres/PostGIS in the OSM render 
toolchain. COORDS is developed from scratch (not based on any existing 
DBMS), and is focused on quickly answering exactly those data queries 
that are typical for tile servers, while reducing memory consumption and 
I/O load over Postgres, especially for huge data sets (e.g. planet dumps).

The first version of COORDS has recently been released as .deb packages 
for Ubuntu 14.04. These can be found in the PPA 
https://launchpad.net/~rbuch703/+archive/ubuntu/openstreetmap . 
Installation and configuration instructions can be found at 
http://rbuch703.github.io/coords/ . Manual build instructions are 
available at the same page, but YMMV as the Mapnik plugin was developed 
only towards the Mapnik version bundled with TileMill (some 2.3.x 
developer release).

This version is yet incomplete (e.g. it handles only OSM ways, no 
relations or individual nodes), but can already be used as a replacement 
for Postgres in the OSM render toolchain (demo tile server: 
http://render.rbuch703.de ; yes, the map style sucks :-) ). Performance 
comparisons to Postgres are difficult as COORDS is still incomplete, but 
initial tests look promising: on a 2.4 GHz server with 32GB RAM and 
HDD-based storage, the import of a planet dump takes only about six 
hours (Postgres via osm2pgsql takes more than 72h on the same hardware), 
and rendering the level 3 metatile containing all the world's railway 
tracks and major roads in the demo map style takes less than a minute.

At this time, I am mostly looking for people who are willing to test 
this beta release of COORDS and give feedback of any kind (performance, 
ease-of-use, suitability for render servers, missing features, ...).

COORDS is free software, licensed under the AGPL v3 (tools) and LGPL2.1 
(Mapnik plugin), respectively. Source code is available from github at 
https://github.com/rbuch703/coords and 
https://github.com/rbuch703/coords-mapnik-plugin .


Best Regards,
Robert Buchholz