133 A set of three case studies, showing how PostGIS is used in high-performance production situations by private companies and government. PostGIS is an open source spatial data extension to the PostgreSQL relational database management system. Like Oracle Spatial, PostGIS provides extra spatial objects, functions and indexes to the underlying RDBMS, allowing powerful GIS storage, analysis and retrieval to be carried out at the server tier of enterprise IT infrastructures. The PostGIS spatial database has been publicly available for over five years, and global uptake of the software has been tremendous. In addition to near-universal support from open source tools, PostGIS is increasingly supported by proprietary tools as well. All this interconnectivity means that PostGIS is being built into more and more operational data centres, serving large volumes of data for clients with high performance and reliability requirements. This session will review three case-studies showing PostGIS being used in the government and private sector as an operational spatial database. FOSS4G2006 - Free And Open Source Software for Geoinformatics Session 5 : Development Paul Ramsey pramsey@refractions.net Paul Ramsey pramsey@refractions.net <MaKaC.conference.ContributionType object at 0xb4936b6c> Spatial Databases