Hi Rudy,
To shed a bit more light on your post, it should be noted that Dimitri is the
product manager for Manifold. His official title may represent a higher
position in the company, but my point is, you are fighting a wothless battle,
not on the basis of the each product's capibilities, but more so based on
Dimitri's personality.
Dimitri trolls numerous listserves promoting his own product, and does so in
a manner that makes the hair raise up on your back. He is a true blowhard, who
thinks Manifold is the greatest thing since sliced bread. He usually gets
blasted on every listserve he posts on (I've even seen negative comments about
him on his own Manifold listserve), but it never stops him. In fact, I'm
surprised he didn't mention his favorite line: "Manifold has over 1,000, 000
lines of program code". In brief, as a high ranking officer of his company, he
is pretty embarrassing, and is probably the leading reason I would never
consider using Manifold.
As such, I personally can't state what is better, Maptitude or Manifold.
Manifold is cheaper by a slim margin. However, in my county, I know of two
very seasoned GIS professionals who have at their disposal ESRI, Manifold, and
Maptitude. They use ESRI because as a government agency, the investment was
made, and they are stuck with it. Both individuals have indicated (unsolicted
by me) that while Manifold had a lot of power for its price, it was difficult
to learn to use, i.e., had a steep learning curve. The Manifold users loved
Maptitude, thought it was the easiest GIS package to learn, and felt it was
just as powerful as ESRI and Manifold. In fact, during their public
presentations, they show all the capabilities of their system (which is based
on ESRI), but end their presentation with a demonstartion and recomendation of
Maptitude, and do not mention Manifold.
Anyway, just thought I'd share this with you. Dimitri is out to promote and
sell Manifold, and will criticize all other GIS programs in doing so. To
debate him is futile. Thank goodness Caliper staff doesn't embarrass
themselves with such shameless tactics.
Aniruddha Banerjee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi all (and especially the Caliper software architects):
I put in the following comments in a GIS blog (website:
http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2006/12/21/fighting-manifold-or-fighting-the-way-ive-learned-gis/
). Feel free to comment on it since I find some rather inaccurate comments
(from Dimitri) about Maptitude....(you are welcome to respond)
Here's the partial text:
#
Rudy // Mar 31, 2007 at 4:26 pm
I've used all kinds of GIS since the DOS days (15 years and counting) and I can
assure you that by far the best GIS software is Maptitude from Caliper
Corporation. It is a vector GIS software that can also read and handle raster
imagery. It's native database management is vastly superior to any other GIS
(can handle all the TIGER line files of the US in one shot; it can handle one
billion!! records and one million fields unlike MS access that allows only
256 fields). It can read oracle and other DBMS without using programming. An
upgrade to TransCAD (another product from Caliper) allows you to perform
redistricting using integer programming and other graph theoretic methods
(invert matrices and store matrices of 25 K in native format). I can go on and
I am happy to debate on this issue. Oh BTY I have an advanced ArcIMS
certificate from ESRI for which my previous employer paid 1000s. I use C++ and
R to do programming but was never required to program for my GIS stuff. Now
that's a great software. Isn't it?
Rudy B., PhD
Berkeley, CA
#
82 Dimitri // Apr 1, 2007 at 9:25 am
For all of its limitations I don't think anyone would describe Maptitude as
other than as a competent and pleasant GIS. It is well-matched to its target
market and has a good following.
Despite its many limitations (no IMS, small number of importable formats,
etc.), if you think it is the best GIS ever, well, you are entitled to your
opinion. What makes for "best" in someone's eyes is not necessarily the most
features or the most sophisticated capabilities but the right balance for that
someone's particular needs.
But this bit
"It's native database management is vastly superior to any other
GIS "
is utterly silly, as Maptitude (for all of its other benefits) is rather
well-known for having particularly weak DBMS capabilities.
I grant you that Maptitude may be improving its products and so is getting
better at DBMS, but if memory serves me right (as assisted by a quick review of
the Caliper website), it seems that the following gross DBMS limitations to
Maptitude still apply:
To take the most obvious, Maptitude connects to DBMS using ODBC, a terribly
obsolete way to go. GIS packages with better DBMS capability can connect using
more modern technologies such as OLE DB or ADO .NET. Connecting to SQL Server
using OLE DB is about 600 times faster, read/write, than using ODBC, so this is
a very big deal.
Although Maptitude is said to be able to read "oracle spatial tables" (a
particularly weird way of phrasing the matter, as if there is a host of
"gotcha's" waiting in the wings), there is no mention of any sophisticated
ability to do read/write/edits with many simultaneous users as is normally
desired with Oracle Spatial, nor of projection matching on the fly nor of any
support for GeoRasters, nor of storing formatting and other key drawing
characteristics. All those things are necessary if you are really working with
Oracle Spatial as a fully capable client and not just as some "read-only" usage
of Oracle as a one-way data source. I grant you it is cool that Maptitude can
read Oracle spatial data at all, but to do so in what is apparently a highly
limited way is not the way one wins standing as "vastly superior."
For that matter, if you really are on top of your DBMS game you'll be able to
read/write/edit not just Oracle spatial but a host of different
geometry-in-DBMS data types and DBMS systems, including, for example OGC WKB
and WKT, ESRI-style geometry and so on in other DBMS packages, such as SQL
Server. Don't see any of that in Maptitude.
There is no trace of spatial SQL within Maptitude, something you'd expect any
GIS laying claim to serious chops in the DBMS world to offer. If you can't do
spatial SQL you're just not in the DBMS game in GIS, not even at the beginner
level let alone as the best.
I'll skip over the hundreds of small, but useful, capabilities that a truly
DBMS-capable GIS has and Maptitude does not (example: right click on a column
and choose "change type" to instantly change type
) and conclude with a very
telling "big" thing: zero support for 64-bit code and multicore processors.
Modern DBMS is multi-threaded. If you can't run multiple threads to your DBMS
connection you're stuck in the dark ages.
To shift gears away from DBMS to programming, since your post indicated a
certain excitement at not having to do programming to do GIS stuff: not since
the dark ages has any modern, interactive GIS required you towrite code to do
GIS stuff, so don't be too excited that this is the case with Maptitude.
It's a bit like a country cousin coming to the city and acting astonished there
is indoor plumbing. The indoor plumbing is indeed great, but one should not
betray too much astonishment at encountering such a convenience, which is taken
for granted in modern times. :-)
I don't mean any of the above as a slam at Maptitude because I happen to like
that software and admire it. I especially admire Maptitude because together
with packages like Manifold it helps set the precedent that one can get truly
useful and pleasant GIS for a fraction of the cost of legacy stuff like ESRI.
People in mainstream software markets understand that, but every bit of
re-education helps for those folks still stuck in legacy notions of
price/performance. So we should all praise Maptitude for helping move GIS into
modern notions of price/performance.
But on the way to praising Maptitude there is no need for inaccuracy, and
suggesting Maptitude is the best GIS there is at DBMS is very far from the
truth, hence this correction.
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