[OSM-talk] live rendering

[Martijn van Oosterhout]

On 5/4/07, Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> wrote:
> > OTOH, I'm not sure that the intensity of write access is the problem we
> > have. I think (but this is only a hunch) the writing problems are mostly
> > due to things being locked by the read operations. PostGres would remove
> > these issues with it's MGA architecture.
>
> Now you are right in my area :)
> FiBRE is just one of the Firebird facilities that allow for load sharing
> without the need to go to the big boy databases. Firebird has always had MGA,
> triggers and UDF's, and for systems that require the sort of capacity that OSM
> already needs it has all the tools in place. Posgres is slowly catching up on
> THAT side of things - but I have to admit that Posgres has concentrated on
> areas like PostGIS instead.

Both FireBird and PostgreSQL have very long histories, and both have
had support for triggers and features that for, well, it feels like
forever :). But PostGIS is developed completely seperately from
postgres. Postgres itself provides many geometric operations and
indexing but PostGIS is more complete. In a sense postgis is overkill
for osm, but mapnik uses it, so we may as well use it.

FiBRE just sounds like what slony-i does for postgres, I didn't
quickly see what was special about it.

> Triggers are added to the master server to carry out such operations as
> converting raw text into entries in secondary tables. We can maintain all of
> the 'free form' capabilities, but rather than storing every single copy of
> 'secondary', these are converted into tags in a text table, and the triggers
> do all the conversion work. Automatically converting 'place=x','name=y' into a
> nice cross referenced location table is almost free!

Damn I'd love it if that could happen. Many of the features that now
require so much effort would basically for free with a good
database...

Have a nice day,
-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog at gmail.com> http://svana.org/kleptog/