Friday, August 07, 2009

Interlude - Cheap(er) Spatial

In the previous post, I mentioned the cost of the Spatial option. There is a way to both decrease the cost and increase performance of the geocoding. I thought that would grab your attention.

The secret to improving performance is too precompute the answers. That is, work out the geocode for every street and cross street. I'll cover that in the coming posts.

The secret to reducing cost is Oracle Personal Edition. In the licensing guide, "Personal Edition includes all of the components that are included with Enterprise Edition, as well as all of the options that are available with Enterprise Edition". This is distinct from the Enterprise Edition wording which states that it "can be further enhanced with the purchase of the options". My emphasis. So you get Spatial free with Personal Edition.

Personal Edition is normally $460 according to the Oracle Store. That's for a perpetual license though. If you only wanted to do a one-off job, or just reduce your startup costs, it has the option of a one year license for $92 (though support would double that). And, for reasons I can't even guess at, Personal Edition only runs on Windows so you may have to add a Windows license to that.

Of course, with Personal Edition you do have to be very careful that only one person uses it, so this is best suited to an environment with one off processing, or where a bunch of data can be imported, processed and extracted as part of a daily or weekly batch by the license holder.

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