Custom GDAL binaries for MapGuide Open Source 2.6 and 3.0

A question that gets normally asked on our mailing list is how do you get the GDAL FDO provider to work with formats like ECW or MrSID. Our normal response would be (provided you are licensed to use ECW, MrSID or any other non-standard GDAL supported format) to point you over to GIS internals and grab one of their custom windows GDAL binaries to replace the GDAL dlls in your current MapGuide installation.

The reason we ask you to do this is because when we build GDAL for use with the FDO provider, we build GDAL using only the standard profile of supported formats. That is to say any format listed here:

• http://www.gdal.org/formats_list.html
• http://gdal.org/ogr_formats.html

Where the Compiled by default option is unconditionally Yes. It is not possible for us logistically to build GDAL/OGR with the proverbial kitchen sink of raster/vector format support, so that's where GIS internals comes in as their builds of GDAL/OGR have greater raster/vector format support. As long as you grab the same release of GDAL and make sure to pick the build that is built with the same MSVC compiler used to build the release of MapGuide/FDO you're using, you should then have GDAL and OGR FDO providers with expanded vector and raster format support.

This suggestion worked up until the 2.5.2 release, where the right version of GDAL built with the right version of MSVC (2010 at the time) was available for download. But for 2.6 and the (pending) 3.0 releases, this suggestion is not applicable because that site does not offer a MSVC 2012 build of GDAL 1.10, which is what MapGuide 2.6 and 3.0 both use for their GDAL FDO provider.

So this leaves some of you in a pickle, being stuck on 2.5.2 and unable to move to 2.6 or 3.0 because you need to support one of these esoteric data formats. Well, I have partially alleviated this issue for you.

Tamas has not only made these custom GDAL binaries for download, but also the development kits used to build these binaries as well. So in these past few days, I grabbed the MSVC 2012 dev kit, paired it with our internal GDAL 1.10 source tree in FDO and made a few tweaks to some makefiles here and there and here's the end result.

A custom build of GDAL 1.10 with support for the following additional raster data formats:

• ECW (rw): ERDAS Compressed Wavelets (SDK 3.x)
• JP2ECW (rw+v): ERDAS JPEG2000 (SDK 3.x)
• FITS (rw+): Flexible Image Transport System
• GMT (rw): GMT NetCDF Grid Format
• netCDF (rw+s): Network Common Data Format
• WCS (rovs): OGC Web Coverage Service
• WMS (rwvs): OGC Web Map Service
• HTTP (ro): HTTP Fetching Wrapper
• Rasterlite (rws): Rasterlite
• PostGISRaster (rws): PostGIS Raster driver
• MBTiles (rov): MBTiles

And support for the following additional vector formats:

• "PostgreSQL" (read/write)
• "NAS" (readonly)
• "LIBKML" (read/write)
• "Interlis 1" (read/write)
• "Interlis 2" (read/write)
• "SQLite" (read/write)
• "VFK" (readonly)
• "OSM" (readonly)
• "WFS" (readonly)
• "GFT" (read/write)
• "CouchDB" (read/write)
• "ODS" (read/write)
• "XLSX" (read/write)
• "ElasticSearch" (read/write)
• "PDF" (read/write)

You might notice some omissions from this list. Where's MrSID? Where's Oracle? Where's $NOT_COMPILED_BY_DEFAULT_DATA_FORMAT?

Well I did say I have partially alleviated the issue and not fully alleviated it. The issue is that due to what I gather is licensing restrictions, the development kit can't bundle the necessary headers and libraries needed to build GDAL with driver support for MrSID, OCI, etc. As such the custom build of GDAL I have made available does not include support for such formats.

What can be done about this. For something like Oracle, we already have a dedicated FDO provider for that. For something like MrSID? I'm afraid you're out of luck. You'll either have to stick on the 2.5.2 release for that much longer, or just bite the bullet and gdal_translate those MrSID files to something more accessible. I've heard some good things about RasterLite. I've also heard that you could get some great performance out of carefully prepared GeoTiffs. 

Any thing to liberate yourself from MrSID because you won't see the right GDAL binaries with this support built in for the foreseeable future.

You can find the download links for the custom GDAL builds in our updated GDAL provider guide for MapGuide 2.6 and 3.0.

One more thing before I finish that is worth re-iterating. Some formats like ECW, require you to be have a license to use ECW technology in a server environment. Other formats carry their own licensing shenanigans, so make sure you are properly licensed to use any of the the additional formats that are made available with this custom build of GDAL. The GISInternals build system repo on GitHub has all the applicable licenses in RTF format for your perusal.

Also worth pointing out is that this custom build of GDAL is not supported by me or anyone on the MapGuide development team. I only make this build available to you so you have the ability to access these additional data formats should you so choose and nothing more. There is no obligation by us to provide support for any issues that may arise as a result of using this custom GDAL release (inferred or otherwise). Use this custom build of GDAL at your own discretion.

/end lawyer-y talk. Enjoy!