Unlike traditional GIS data, which usually uses just a couple of attributes per spacial object, openstreetmaps comes with a free tagging scheme. In traditional database design it is impossible to store this type of data in a single table thus adding the need for joins in any single SQL request.

Starting from Version 9.0 PostgreSQL will however include an extension called hstore which is available as a backport for current Versions of PostgreSQL (8.3 and 8.4) and even as a debian package.

Using this extension an additional key/value table is no longer needed.

Already back in March I commited a patch for osm2pgsl which would allow for storage of tag objects inside such a hstore column.

An hstore is basically what is known as hash (perl) or dictionary (python) in scripting languages. A datatype for storage of key value pairs – well suited for storage of OSM data tags.

Talking about python I took me quite some time to figure out how to convert a hstore result from an SQL query so here is how it works:

q="select (each(tags)).key,(each(tags)).value from ... where ..."
cur.execute(q)
rows = cur.fetchall()
hstore=dict(rows)

Back to the actual hstore issue…

In the meantime people are actually starting to use this stuff and MaZder even wrote a HOWTO document (currently in german language only) on howto set up such a database.

So here are the projects currently using hstore that I am aware of:

• Query-to-map
• Map Styles on the Wikimedia Toolserver
• Open Link Map
• Mail and Phone Map
• Open Brewpub Map (my own pet project)