Hi Holyfoot, others I've been reading up on the state of GIS functionality. It would be great if I can get some answers directly from the source! 1) Comparing MariaDB and what's there in MySQL 5.6.1: are these identical but independent implementations? If there are differences, what are they? 2) Apparently PostGIS requires to do all kinds of gymnastics both when installing and when doing version upgrades. MySQL/MariaDB spatial functions are just there to be used, right? 3) Speaking of PostGIS, its manual reveals that their GiST R-tree index actually only works on the bounding rectangles of shapes. Is this the case also for MyISAM/Aria R-tree indexes, or would MariaDB actually filter the result set to only return shapes that are within the search shape for real. And btw, does the search shape have to be a box, or can it be any shape? 4) Lack of InnoDB R-tree indexes... What would it take to do that? Is the current implementation re-usable in any way (ie just store current R-tree indexes into InnoDB pages...) or would it have to be a separate implementation? 5) Euclidean geometrics only... PostGIS and SQLite use the separate GEOS library (and cousins like PROJ.4). Why isn't this used in the MySQL/MariaDB implementation? It seems to me, you could get accurate handling of different (non-euclidean) projections by using these libraries, "for free". henrik -- henrik.ingo@avoinelama.fi +358-40-8211286 skype: henrik.ingo irc: hingo www.openlife.cc My LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=9522559