28 replies to this topic

[Pete]

Ouch! Those files cost a bit of money don't they?

[DaveP]

Ouch! Those files cost a bit of money don't they?

No, they've open sourced them! https://www.ordnance...d/products.html Scroll down a bit for 'Code-Point Open'. The Post Office PAF file cost (and probably still does) Brewster's, but these are freebies (albeit a hefty download).

[Pete]

Wow! That's pretty awesome!

There are some exciting things you can do when calculating a radius from a given postcode for finding things nearby (as the crow flies) etc, so this is very good news indeed and ideal for an upcoming project.

That's the other thing I love about these forums - you find out cool new stuff every day because the community likes to share

[DaveP]

I found some code for calculating the nearest points (postcode x,y) using a mySQL spatial point field in each postcode record. I'm using it in an extranet project at work so if an advertiser asks one of our reps if we have other sites nearby, they can find out which, and how near. It is only on my office development system at the moment and unfortunately, the first query takes about 15 seconds to do the math on the whole 1.6 million postcodes, but once the cache is primed, subsequent queries are sub-second.

<edit>Sorry, this has gone a bit off-topic.</edit>

[Michael Murphy]

@DaveP - thanks for sharing. So you managed to use PW with 1.6 million pages (for each UK postcode)?

Interesting to hear how far people have pushed the system. The most I have tried so far is 1,800 pages. I have an upcoming project that will need ~ 100,000 pages, so wondering if PW would be suitable. It's not really a public facing website, more a tool that will be used by a few people for analysing and aggregating data, like your nearby intranet tool.

[DaveP]

Well, the system uses the postcode file, but I haven't actually made PW aware of that table, due to the lack of a spatial field type in PW. And just thinking about my post above, it doesn't churn through all 1.6million, just the ones referenced by other records. The point about PW is that using mySQL, it is bound to be fast and scalable.

[apeisa]

With huge amount of pages you could run scalability issues on some file systems (due the fact that PW automatically creates a folder for each page). Though this has been discussed and fix is coming at some point (can't find the topic now).

[diogo]

It's here http://processwire.c...tsfiles-folder/

[Michael Murphy]

Thanks for the feedback and extra information, good to hear.