Talk:Requests for comment/Native geospatial data types

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From GeoData developer

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MaxSem (talkcontribs)

If it's about the conversion of GD's DB-backed searches from tile-based to R-tree, just submit a patch. It's trivial enough and would not affect WMF because we're using Solr (and will switch to Elasticsearch shortly). The present kludge is caused by an obsolete MySQL version we used to have at some point.

Jnatividad (talkcontribs)

Will see if I can pull together a patch over the next few weeks. BTW, spatial indices only work on MyISAM tables on MySQL 5.6. Will using MyISAM be a problem?

MaxSem (talkcontribs)

Heh, I was under impression that InnoDB supports it since 5.5, however it indeed added only FULLTEXT index support, not SPATIAL. Then the situation changes: what do you need spatial indexes for? They indeed cause less I/O, however in practice tiled search works as good if you keep geo_tags hot and don't have too many coordinates stored. And if you need to search through the number of points comparable with English Wikipedia, you will need a specialised solution anyway. So you have pros of spatial indexes:

  • No kludges.
  • Faster.

And cons:

  • Slower updates. Spatial indexes are ridiculously slow to update with ~1M rows in my experience.
  • MyISAM is crashy.
  • MyISAM is not replication-friendly.
Jnatividad (talkcontribs)

Then perhaps this RFC should be tabled till MariaDB 10.x with the Aria storage engine is more widespread and being used by WMF (assuming that is where WMF is going). Aria, from what I've read, should address the crashiness/replication/non-transactional nature of MyISAM, with all the benefits of an ACID compliant storage engine.

MaxSem (talkcontribs)

Once again, WMF is not using MySQL/Maria for searches and will never be. Whatever changes are made are for third parties/development wikis.

Jnatividad (talkcontribs)

Its settled then. I'll vacate the RFC then and wait till the ElasticSearch implementation is done. Geospatial features of ES are being leveraged, right? Will there be API access similar to GeoData's geosearch? Of course, for third-party wikis, we can go straight to the ES API, but was just wondering.

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