[OSM-talk] Creating custom OSM sites using the Mapnik OSM plugin?

[Jochen Plumeyer]

Hi Nick!

On Lun 22 Feb 2010, Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> Do people think this is a good idea? It's one of several possibilities
> that I'd like to work on, though I'd probably only do so if there's
> sufficient interest and/or I can't resolve the memory issues on my own
> site in other ways.

well, to handle amounts data as large as planet.osm in a performant manner, I 
think you need efficient database-like infrastructure (fast search trees, 
cache mechanisms and such).

I wrote a potential zero-install script to use SQLite for OSM data, which 
performance already is rather low, but for let's say < 100 MByte osm file 
that would be feasable.
But would this be sane? I don't think so, because like this you use CPU 
resources like a Hummer SUV uses gas (until the tile cache is filled).

On the other hand, you can compile PostgreSQL in a local way, in your local 
user account. It is actually surprising, that it is just a tiny ~ 5 MByte 
install, nearly as easy to handle as SQLite.
Perhaps this would be a solution, à la WAMP packages which contain software 
stacks like Apache, MySQL, PHP in an easy to use installer.

Are there other efficient binary representations of OSM data?
It seems there are, gosmore contains its own OSM data converter,  
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Gosmore) is fast and uses just 
osm.bz2 * 2 file space.

Cheers,

Jochen