I recently started playing with a couple trial accounts from multi-map for a client of ours. I was quite surprised it is actually running Coldfusion and MySQL. Whilst I have heard of MySQL supporting GIS and Spatial data, I have never seen an implementation or known of one until now.

Whilst playing with Multimap I found a couple bugs within 5 minutes, the first being a problem with some calculations on tabular data types with CF complaining about LEFT(MID etc…
The other was a rather poor implementation of their user interface. I generally do things backwards and as a result rather than clicking through step 1 – ~6 I started at 6. This resulted in CF having trouble with creating a table in MySQL and obviously thowing an error. From what I can gather it is a very simple implementation, of which lat and lon coordinates are populated from their data.

Index

Data
Bug One (MySQL Table Creation)
As you can tell this is a really poor interface, apparently they were reviewing the current interface according to one of their technical guys… If you skip a step you will most likely thow an cold fusion error:(

Table
Bug Two (CF Error)

Stats

Templates

I implemented my own version, however the data I acquired was inaccurate and varied within roughly 1-2 miles as well as being a very limited on the amount of information it contained. I also received the sample RAW PAF (Postcode Address File) data from the Royal Mail, and having a look through seems very detailed, although not quite what I was looking for…

All credit due to the Multimap staff, as they managed to fix both bugs within the hour.