The background to this blog comes from two separate sources: the first is my testing of SQL Server 2008 “Katmai”, and secondly, a blog article that Charlie Savage wrote a while back on The Sad State of GIS Web Standards. Web Mapping Standards As an ex-GIS Manager who monitored GIS standards for possible deployment withinRead More
This posting is to inform my readers that I am in the process of shutting down this website and, when done, it will become nothing more than a link to my new SPDBA website. There is no date for the final switch over; it will only happen when the articles etc have been moved.
There is a discussion going on on LinkekIn about GIS and cloud computing. I responded to the posts and include my comments (which should be read in light of the threads themselves) as follows. The reason is because I have been thinking about the failure (or silence) about whether any update functions (eg the variouslyRead More
Disclaimer What follows is a personal opinion based on experience. While many statements appear critical of the people who create and administer spatial metadata in Australia and overseas that is not my intention: we all do what we can do given time, staff constraints and education and training background. Some assertions may appear to beRead More
This month, January 2009, I was interviewed by Kat Mackintosh, an Australian working for Nestoria in London. Nestoria are currently in the process of expanding their real estate portal into Australia. The interview was mainly concerned with my involvement in a real estate web mapping system in 1997. It also covered my involvement with theRead More
I gave a talk last year entitled Automated Layer Management – Experiences At Mid Coast Water which was about mapping the area that would be affected by a mains pipe bursting in either a sewer or water network. (Yes it was a not very exciting title.) The mapping was all done in 2D as OracleRead More
Recently, I had cause to look at the implementation of the OGC/SQLMM Geometry_Columns and Spatial_Ref_Sys metadata views in Oracle. ISO/TC 211, 6.2 Architecture � SQL implementation using Geometry Types, 6.2.1 Overview says: “This standard defines a schema for the management of feature table, Geometry, and Spatial Reference System information in an SQL-implementation with a GeometryRead More
I gave a rather manic presentation (Open Source, Oracle and PostGIS) at the FOSS4G 2009 Conference at Darling Harbour in Sydney, Australia, on Thursday October 22nd. The presentation was a little risqué at times (anyone offended please accept my apologies: I seem to become a different person when I present) and, I suspect, its messageRead More
There has been some discussion over on the PostGIS email list about the use of primary keys on tables by GIS client software such as uDig, QGis, MapInfo etc. It is a discussion that comes up now and again (perennial, I suppose) especially when new users of PostGIS (or Oracle on the Oracle forum etc)Read More
In my consulting travels I, like many other database-loving specialists, find databases with little (a Primary Key, perhaps) or no constraints being applied to the data model managed by a relational database (which may be Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL etc). I finalised a report for a Government Department here in Australia recently where thisRead More