Hello, I hope I can answer some parts of your question. Yes, there will be 2 copies of the "OSM database".
The database for rendering contains also tables with some "raw data" like nodes, ways and relations, because we need them for updating. But there will be not all indexes on this raw data so that you can't use it for everything.
I believe the project is ambitious enough also if we only concentrate us on rendering. I mean it's in the moment hard to predict how many requests we will get per second.
The ambitious whishlist is there: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/OSM_Tileserver#Future_Work All things in this list are things with direct profit for Wikipedia. This profit I can't see if we would have databases for routing, OverpassAPI, user-statistics or Nominatim. If somebody can explain the reasons, we should be open for it, otherwise I think it's better to concentrate on a flexible(hstore) and high-performance rendering database. If our database on Toolserver would be faster, I know that we could perform with this database-layout a lot of more geospatial analysis, because we can use all features of PostGIS.
Greetings Tim alias Kolossos
Am 22.08.2013 23:03, schrieb Eugene Alvin Villar:
Hello Sumana (and Brandon and Marc-André),
There's been a mention of getting 2 copies of the "OSM database", one for the use of the production tileserver and the other for the use of Wikimedia Labs. Is this correct?
What I'd like to know is if this is the raw OSM database, which contains the raw OSM data that is suitable for editing, or a rendering OSM database suitable for rendering map tiles. The rendering database is usually loaded with a program like osm2pgsql[1] from raw OSM data that is either in XML or PBF file formats.
The problem with a rendering OSM database is that this is optimized for rendering map tiles, which is excellent for the production tileserver. However, this database is (mostly) unsuitable for other purposes such as routing and (probably) spatial analysis. This may hamper possible use cases of developers on Wikimedia Labs wanting to explore using OSM data for various purposes.
[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osm2pgsql
Thanks, Eugene