Server is settled down

Had a server OS upgrade (well more like an upheaval, when the auto re-image at the hosting provider continually failed ). Things are running on a more solid and more recent OS Centos 5 (2.6.18 kernel), Apache is now version 2.2.3 My SQL at version 5.0.77 and PHP at 5.1.6. It's certainly not on the bleeding edge, but it certainly is not five years behind the times. Also for now, it has an extra 20 GB from the conversion (the techs had to swap out a hard drive). This machine still has plenty of legs left. I'm definitely looking forward to having setting up my workstation for development of my site. Managed to get a decent domain name roamigo.com "Roam I Go" ... that matches the intent of the site. Started looking into how to best represent geographic data in a database, and also started wondering about database designs as well as database implementations. One intriguing possibility is to use a column store architecture (yes on an online database with continuous submissions !!). MonetDB is a good candidate. One reason for this would be speed of queries and especially joins. Another possible advantage would be the natural data partitioning that a column store database supposedly has. That would come in handy when parallel servers are needed. That of course would only be necessary if/when the site has a lot of growth. Of course ease of maintainability and ease of scaling should be considered when choosing an implementation. Cant wait to really get into all of it.