Its been a while, but things happen and time goes racing past making a lovely whooshing sound. But over the last little while I have been playing with a few things.
I had the opportunity to have a look at Bentley Map (which I have been looking at for a while) and Autodesk Map 3D. Now I have been working with the Bentley products for a while now, so I needed to go through this process with an open mind (which was hard at times).
Now rival software companies are always playing leap frog, company A will have a cool feature and company B will have a better version of the same feature in their next release. We all know how this works. So everything I am about to say is only valid for the releases I have worked with, and I know both companies are getting ready to release newer versions. So the versions I played with are Bentley Map XM Edition (8.09.xx) and Autodesk Map 3D 2008 Edition.
Now I like Bentley Map and the flexibility you have as far as the GUI is concerned, especially over 2 monitors, I found this a bit more difficult with Autodesk Map 3D (in fact the only way I could get it to work over 2 monitors was to stretch it).
I found the dynamic annotation / labelling in Map 3D was brilliant, I have never had so much control over labelling and label flow in any GIS product that I have used, so well done Autodesk. The annotation in Bentley Map is purely static (unless you go through a convoluted setup process), and is basically none existant (except for normal CAD annotation tools). Also in Bentley Map linking to an Oracle Spatial database is reasonably brain dead, and the product doesn't use the attributes from the database (this also applies to other file formats able to be openned by the product).
I found the Bentley Map openned more file formats than Autodesk Map 3D, and the performance of managing those files was a lot better. I have spoken with the Autodesk guys and they are looking into why this may be the case and what can be done to improve the performance. The performance was so bad, that it took several minutes to load around 50,000 polygons, where the Bentley Map product opens the same file in about 1 minute. Selecting the same polygons in Bentley Map took a minute or two, but after waiting over 15 minutes I crashed out of Autodesk Map 3D. Up until this point I was reasonably excited with the product, but this just killed it for me.
Unfortunaley, I didn't get a chance to test the Autodesk product with an Oracle Spatial database. But I am not very happy with the Bentley Map support.
Overall I think both products have weaknesses when compared with each other and other more mainstream GIS products, but they do have some really good features. I think most GIS companies could learn from Autodesks dynamic labelling. I think both products are immature when compared with other GIS products, but they both have full 3D support and great CAD tools. I also like that Bentley ship the SDK with Bentley Map and are pushing for developers to write in native C/C++/C# code instead of a propriety language.
As far as cost goes, Autodesk Map 3D is around three quarters (3/4) of the cost of Bentley Map. This is because Bentley Map requires a full Bentley MicroStation license. You can opt for Bentley PowerMap* which offers most of the same functionality (apart for some more advanced CAD features) for around the same price as the Autodesk product.
Now as I said at the start, both Autodesk and Bentley are due to relaese newer versions of these products. I understand that Bentley are launching their latest version of MicroStation (version 8.11 code named "Athens") very soon, and this will have flow on changes to Bentley Map. And no doubt Autodesk will also be launching their 2009 family of products very soon.
So it will be interesting to have another look in about 6 months and once again compare these growing products.
* Bentley PowerMap uses Bentley PowerDraft as the main engine instead of Bentley MicroStation.
Bentley and Autodesk
CAD vs. GIS
Over the last few months, I have spent some time looking at CAD products, GIS products and CAD based GIS products. All of these products groups have there place, but how do you get the best of both worlds.
It seems wrong to design something in your CAD package, produce an as-built plan (CAD), and then export / import that data into your GIS package, and in some cases export the data back to CAD for cartographic and visualisation. A lot of time and resources are spent in this process of importing and exporting of data between GIS and CAD. I have heard of some organisations having up to six (6) import/export operations.
Part of this wasted resource can be minimised by CAD based GIS. Products like Bentley Map and Autodesk Map use a core CAD engine (and support CAD file formats), but have basic GIS functionality. Now as a GIS, these packages tend to be very immature.
So what is the solution?
The solution is to use the best product for the job. So I have been looking at using CAD based GIS products for data capture, data management, and visualisation. But using traditional GIS products to for analysis of the same data (without the import/export process).
How can this be done?
This is simply done by using a database as the backend data store instead of the native file formats. I tested this with the Oracle XE database. I loaded existing GIS data, opened the data from a CAD based GIS package (Bentley Map). Data analysis was performed in a traditional GIS package (MapInfo Professional). With cartographic presentation being done with a CAD package (Bentley MicroStation).
The key to making this all work was the backend database. At this stage, Oracle is the most widely supported database platform that will allow for this to work. Hopefully, Microsoft SQL Server (with there spatial support) will have better support in the near future (I know for some products this will be at-least another year away). But it would also be nice to see more support for open source databases.
Oracle vs. Microsoft
Well I have finally made some time to look at Oracle and SQL Server 2008 and the basic spatial functionality of both these products. Now my objective when I played with these products was to create an environment where I can have a single store for both spatial and a-spatial data and access and manipulate the data from a variety of clients.
And not too surprising the winner was Oracle, the biggest winning factor for Oracle is that it is here now, and is well supported in many clients.
So what does this mean for SQL Server 2008? Well, I think Microsoft have a big struggle to compete on the spatial side. I worked with Oracle XE, which out performed SQL Server with all the clients I tested. Oracle have also dropped the pricing considerably and can compete on pricing, especially when you can run Oracle on a Linux server to get even better performance, and lower costs.
So what about MapInfo SpatialWare on SQL Server? Again the native Oracle client is much quicker the connecting to SpatialWare (via ODBC). And given that SpatialWare is probably only going to be around for a few more releases (at the most), I would probably invest in Oracle.
What about for smaller installations? Again, Oracle have their free XE release which I found easy to setup and get working.
So which is better? Well as yet I am undecided, but at this stage I think Oracle. I think time will tell, but it will be interesting to see the development programs for support of SQL Server in the client software.
What are they doing?
Over the last few days, I have been looking at the latest releases of PB MapInfo Professional and Bentley Map. I was excited when PB MapInfo announced support for SQL Server 2008, and I had heard rumours that Bentley Map is also getting support in the May 2008 release. I thought this would give me a solution that would allow me to have the best of both products and store the data in a common format and a central location.
Now, when I installed Bentley Map; I wasn't too surprised that the SQL Server support wasn't there (since it was only a rumour that I heard and Bentley Systems hadn't made any public statement). I have since found some comments in a Bentley forum stating that the support is still some time away. My guess is that it will be in the Bentley Microstation "Athens" release, which is currently under development (or the release of Bentley Map for "Athens").
On the other hand; PB MapInfo did announce support for SQL Server 2008. But as I read the version comparison for MapInfo Professional 9.5, I notice this "Support for Read SQL Server 2008 native Spatial data and read and write SQL Server 2008 textual data". So "yes" MI Pro 9.5 supports SQL Server 2008, as long as you don't want to edit the spatial features. This sound almost like read-only access.
For many people who has Safe Software FME, we have had read-only support for SQL Server 2008 (from MI Pro 9.0) for some time, so how is this much different? I can think of some situations where you may want to edit the attribute data without modifying the spatial data, but not many.
I expected that since both Bentley Systems and PB MapInfo have adopted the Microsoft platform, and work closely with Microsoft; that they would both fully support the latest technology from Microsoft, but this is not the case.
I have heard the MapInfo SpatialWare support would be 6 - 12 months after the release of SQL Server 2008. My guess is that both PB MapInfo Professional and Bentley Map won't have full support for SQL Server 2008 until their next major releases (at the earliest), so this could be around this time next year.
I have been told that AutoDesk, ESRI, many open source projects and a few smaller GIS applications already have full read / write support for SQL Server 2008 (I haven't checked this for myself). So why hasn't Bentley Systems and PB MapInfo?
So is there much in this release of these products? Bentley Map didn't seem to change much since the last version I saw, I think this was more of an update and patching. But MI Pro has some new features. PB MapInfo have added .NET programming support and added MapCAD (which is available separately, see http://www.geoas.de/ for details), but the support I have been wanting to see in both these products just isn't there.
So, if you are looking for a common data store, and database for you spatial data, and need it to be supported by both PB MapInfo and Bentley Systems, then your only options is still Oracle, even the free version supports the basic SDO_GEOMETRY and for a datastore, this is all you need.
Mash Up 2008 - Part 3
Today I got an email from the New Zealand Geospatial Office about the Mash Up Competition and all things are go. The rules can be viewed at http://www.barcamp.org.nz/wellington-spatial-mash-2008-1-may-2008/rules-mash-2008.
Geospatial Mash-up 2008 brings together leading technical experts and budding enthusiasts. The aim of the event is to showcase how geospatial data about New Zealand can be used. The New Zealand Geospatial Office seeks to highlight the value of being able to easily combine and reuse data for multiple purposes. In addition, the Office seeks to show how open source software and open source standards can be used to analyse and display data.
