Andrew Bidochko

MySQL Innodb on RedHat Enterprise vs MySQL Innodb on Solaris http://www.sun.com/x64/docs/MySQL-sysbench-benchmark.pdf

Here’s my comment posted in John Musser blog regards Geocoding APIs (response to Google Releases Maps API v2 post).

Speaking about geocoders I may assume that Yahoo! provides the best one. I love it because it works for both US and Canada and it has well engineered communication protocol with multiple geocoding results support. As far as Yahoo! has some restriction to use theirs API in commercial applications and 5K daily limit, I started looking for alternative for Yahoo geocoder…and I have hard time finding good geocoder to feet my needs.
Here’re some issues about existing geocoders. Single country (US or Canada) support only. It’s not a big dial to use 2 separate geocoders for US/Canada addresses but different API and communication protocol drives me crazy. I do not want to have N ‘ifs’ in my code and do not want to have N classes to support API calls for N countries.
It would be great if those companies who provide geocoding API will use the some kind of “standard” API calls and return “standard” result set. That problem was discussed by David Berlind on his StandardsForApiDocumentation session during Mashupcamp (http://www.mashupcamp.com).

Here’s my evolution in geocoders APIs using:
- Started with geocoder.us
- Added geocoder.ca support.
- Switched to Yahoo! Geocoder - stopped using geocoder.us and geocoder.ca
- Right now evaluating ontok http://www.ontok.com/wiki/index.php/Geocode as API for commercial use.