Sophia Parafina — Open Source Mapping in Windows

February 3, 2012 3 Comments

The real game changer is the release of TileMill for Windows.

She’s right, lots of great new options for Windows users.  As Brian Timoney says:

Those are universal skills no matter if you are on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.  Cross platform apps gives you the ability to use your skills everywhere, rather than scripting VBA Microsoft Access “databases”.

 

 

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IBM Makes Offer for Netezza

September 20, 2010 1 Comment

Nothing is final, but it looks like Netezza could be part of the IBM empire:

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) agreed to acquire data specialist Netezza Corp. (NZ) in a deal valued at $1.7 billion, as Big Blue expands its analytics business.

….

Netezza provides technology that allows companies and government agencies to quickly analyze huge amounts of data–something IBM says will give it an advantage in its analytics business.

Netezza offers “a much simpler way to get started on analytics and data warehousing than anyone else in the industry,” said Arvind Krishna, IBM general manager for information management. He told Dow Jones Newswires Netezza’s system can be operated by one person instead of “an army of people” and that it provides increased performance at a lower cost.

Of course Netezza does spatial as well so it will be interesting to see what happens in this space with the IBM R&D behind it.

The big news tonight though is Hawaii Five-0 is back!

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This Just In: Excel Is The World’s Most Used “Database”

June 14, 2010 21 Comments

I’m sure none of us make it though a day without running into one of these wonderful Excel databases people create. Personally I also like using Excel to plan my garden. Is there nothing this thing can’t do?

Take a look at this sweet map I made in Excel of the oil spill in the gulf. I’d upload it to GeoCommons if they just supported Excel.

Wut? I got it all mapped!

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PostGIS in Action – The Book

May 11, 2009 8 Comments

Regina Obe and Leo Hsu have a great new book coming out called PostGIS in Action.  Looking at the table of contents reveals that this should be the book for learning how to use PostGIS in your GIS applications.  I’m really intersted in Chapter 13, “First look at WKT raster”.  Rasters seem to be pushing their way into my workflows so the more I can learn about it, the better I know I’ll be off.

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Oracle enters the cloud (MySQL Enterprise too)

September 22, 2008 6 Comments

Oracle and Amazon today announced that Oracle would be offering some of their products inside Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

The Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager can now be licensed to run in the cloud on Amazon EC2. Customers can even use their existing software licenses with no additional license fees. 

While I see nothing specifically about Oracle Spatial, I assume is can be licensed as well on the cloud.  The benefit to everyone is outside of licensing costs, the ability to launch the Oracle AMIs on EC2 and be up and running in no time.  That plus the scaleability of EC2 (and thus Oracle) means that you don’t have to worry about hardware limitations with your applications.  RSP Architects uses SQL Server as our database of choice, and while I would have been able to run Oracle in a virtual server, I no longer have to worry about hardware constraints to our development.  Just license (which of course I realize is a problem for some people) and start loading the database.  I’m anxious to see how ArcGIS connects to Oracle Spatial on EC2 and what kind of performance I can expect.

Cloudzilla carries Oracle onshore

Cloudzilla could be unbeatable with Oracle in his hands

Now for those who want to avoid Oracle, MySQL Enterprise as well in the Amazon Cloud.

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Netezza’s Spatial Extension to Data Warehouse Appliance

September 12, 2008 4 Comments

All Points Blog has the news that Netezza is set to release a “spatial extension” to their Data Warehouse Appliance.  You may  not think you know much about Netezza, but know that their success keeps Larry Ellison up at night.  There was some discussion on this blog about super fast geospatial analysis and what the target would be.  I think basically Netezza is trying to solve problems that we currently can’t do with existing spatial databases in both scale and speed.  I wouldn’t suspect seeing their product replacing Oracle Spatial or SQL Server, but for those who have the money to pay for the product this could help them answer questions they cannot do right now.  For most of us, just sit back and marvel at what you could do if money was no option and know that in a year or two, much of this technology will be in your hands.  Peter Batty says he’ll be blogging more about what exactly this means in the next week.  Can’t wait to read it.

This type of spatial analysis was only found on Star Trek

This is Star Trek quality spatial data analysis folks

Photo by paper or plastic?

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