What are the hosting options for the Indicia Warehouse?
Firstly, most popular web-hosting packages support just MySQL as a database platform. Unfortunately MySQL is excellent at what it does, but is currently very limited in its capability to store and process spatial data – in particular it does not properly handle reports which request the occurrences falling inside a polygon. It also has weak support for “procedural” code embedded in the database itself. PostgreSQL on the other hand has a very rich support for spatial data and is free and Open Source, which in turn makes it well supported by other mapping tools (it’s pretty easy to draw PostgreSQL data onto a Google Map or a desktop GIS for example). So, our approach to this dilemma has been to split an Indicia based website into 2 parts. The “Warehouse” is where we put the PostgreSQL database. This part provides an administration website plus a set of web services providing access to the data and validation tools. The second part is the bit you get to write – a website that allows your
