Data storage advice needed: Best way to store location + time data?

Question

I have a project in mind that will require the majority of queries to be keyed off of lat/long as well as date + time.

Initially, I was thinking of a standard RDBMS where lat, long, and the datetime field are properly indexed. Then, I began thinking of a document based system where the document was essentially a timestamp and each document has lat/long with in it. Each document could have n objects associated with it.

I'm looking for advice on what would be the best type of storage engine for this sort of thing is - which of the above idea would be better or if there is something else completely that is the ideal solution.

Edit: Looking for an open source/free solution. Unfortunately price is an issue!

Thanks

Answer 1

I have used PostGres (free open source db) with PostGIS extensions for working with location data. They are extremely good, even though I was working in an MS environment with all production databases using MSSQL 2005, I used PostGres w/GIS to manipulate and precalculate a lot of geographic data.

PostGis has utilities for import arcview .shp files which is a huge plus since that's how most geographic data is present. It also provides a host of location based sql functions like contains( ... ) and near( ... ); and it provides a mechanism for indexing spatial data.

It's been awhile since I used it, but I remember it being rock solid and very useful.

PostGIS: http://postgis.refractions.net/

Answer 2

SQL Server 2008 has new data types for storing and processing geographic information, in addition to the usual date and time types.

See "Working with Spatial Data (Database Engine)".