MySQL has added a lot of functionality for Geographical Information System (GIS) data in the last two releases. This has given us better ways to save and explore GIS data. MySQL Workbench is an amazing tool that many do not realize has vastly upped its game for supporting GIS information.  But did you know you can use MySQL Workbench with OpenStreetMap to plot locations?

1. Get your Longitude and Latitude
These, believe it or not, is the hard part.  Go to  https://www.latlong.net/ and type in the name of your location.  It will report back your longitude and your latitude.  For the example I will be using the information for the city of Justin, Texas.

Every once in a while I use MySQL Workbench. First is was only for Windows, then it was unstable and now it is very well usable. Or at least that is the situation when you run on a recent Ubuntu machine.

I'm now using CenOS 5.5 in a VirualBox VM to do some testing. Unfortunately the download site for MySQL Workbench has RPMs for RedHat 6 and Fedora Core 14 and some other platforms. No CentOS, No RHEL5, only the latest Fedora en RHEL.

So I downloaded the RHEL6 RPMs and tried to install them with yum localinstall, but that failed. So they are not backwards compatible with 5.5.

Turns out that CentOS/RHEL 5 doesn't have the required libraries to support MySQL Workbench.

And unfortunately CentOS 5.5 is still the latest release. So an upgrade to CenOS 6 is not yet possible.