> > Hello there, > I'm a freelance Oracle Developer by trade (can almost hear the boos now > ;o)), and am looking into developing my own Snowboarding-related > website over the next few years. Anyway, I'm making some decisions now > about the site architecture, and the database I'm going to need is > obviously included. If my site works out, I'm expecting reasonably > heavy traffic, so want a database that I'm confident can cope with it. > It is out of the question for me to use Oracle, although I am a > (biased) 'fan' of that RDBMS. I definitely need to go for a cheaper > route, and to that end I'm looking at either MySQL or PostgreSQL. One aspect you might consider is that Postgres has an OGC SFS compliant extension, PostGIS, wich is comparable to (or better than :-) Oracle Spatial. MySQL is in the process of developing such a capability, but the current implementation is incomplete and will frequently return wrong answers. Not really buggy (the reasons are clearly documented), but the stage of development is such that I don't think it should have been released as other than alpha software. The ease of integrating web map server applications using data from Postgres/PostGIS tables may be useful for such a site, where maps, road information, photos accessed by clicking on a map, etc might be useful. Applications such as mapserver can treat PostGIS enabled Postgres tables as map layers, and allow spatial queries etc to be carried out as well as normal non-spatial queries. Cheers, Brent Wood
