This article is a compliment to our Postgres OnLine Magazine May/June 2008 issue Cross Compare of SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL and our inaugural issue December 2007 PostGIS for geospatial analysis and mapping.

In this comparison we shall focus on the suitability of these for spatial analysis, mapping and general GIS processing. We are only comparing these three databases because these are the ones we use most often and care about. Most of this information is gleened from the help docs and our general understanding of availability of tools.

We shall note that in terms of affordability vs. functionality SQL Server 2008 and PostGIS are the front-runners. While the spatial functionality and speed of MySQL significantly lags that of SQL Server 2008 spatial and PostGIS, we felt it important to include because MySQL has such a large install base. If MySQL spatial capabilities does just enough of what you need and at adequate speed, by all means there is no need to swap it out.

The IBM DB2 and Oracle Spatial offerings are in general more costly and while the free versions of those do offer a great bit of functionality, they are limited to number of processors that can be used, functionality and size of database.

Oracle 11G only provides Locator (and not Oracle Spatial) for their express and Non-Enterprise, for Enterprise - its an additional priced offering on top of the regular enterprise price to upgrade your Locator to Spatial. While Oracle 11G is a bit more generous than its 10G offering, locator spatial functions are significantly less than Oracle Spatial and are missing critical functions such as ST_Intersection and ST_Centroid. Although Oracle locator does provide geodetic support, it has vastly less functionality than their Oracle Spatial offering. See Simon's Oracle Locator vs. Enterprise Spatial licensing limitations and Oracle 11G locator white paper.

IBM charges for geodetic as a separate priced blade on-top of their regular offerings. Their IBM DB2 Express-C does have a freely downloadable DB2 Spatial Extender which by accounts appears to be rich and they do have the unique generosity of allowing up to 2 processors, unlimited size db, but limited to 4G on board memory. See DB2 Express-C and DB2 Spatial Extender White paper for more details.

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