This is awesome. Purely out of interest, how would one go about a similar location database for arbitrary locations in space? PostGIS presumably assumes a spheroid planet; what if I'm tracking objects in interplanetary space? Are there any DB plugins (accessible outside of national space agencies) that can do that?
That would require arbitrary telemetry and possibly non-deterministic solution, or something like SPICE(https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit.html) which is a bit too far outside of 'database' domain.
Proper motion is rather slow. Fortunately astronomy can take measurements across the centuries.
"Proper motion was suspected by early astronomers (according to Macrobius, AD 400) but a proof was not provided until 1718 by Edmund Halley, who noticed that Sirius, Arcturus and Aldebaran were over half a degree away from the positions charted by the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus roughly 1850 years earlier."
For a person who is relying on benchmarks, you should know that benchmarks are only a rough indication of how well anything performs for a very specific use case.
Your reply is arrogant and ignorant, and you should feel bad about typing that.
> If you are that interested do your own tests.
Why is he not allowed to review your results or check what factors you benchmarked it on?
If there's no citation, that claim does not stand.
To be fair, Oracle is usually extremely good at most of the stuff it does. I've no idea about GIS specifically, but, generally, you get what you pay for.
I'm being nitpicky but "geography" means "description of Earth" so if we aren't talking about Earth it's not geography anymore :-). The word might be topography?
Ha, I personally always assumed that "earth" in this context refers to land/soil. Could anyone familiar with the Greek root let me know if that works in the original?
As you can see, the greek word refers equally well to the planet (sense I, "the earth, including land and sea, in contrast to heaven") and the dirt (senses 2, III, and IV), just like the english word.
Phil Stooke has an interesting method for modeling small space objects, would be interesting to apply a non-spherical coordinate system. http://publish.uwo.ca/~pjstooke/plancart.htm
