I make my first steps in the GIS world and everything is very new for me even if I work on a "huge" project (ie: for a single programmer) very related to maps.
My project needs to know informations below for any location of the world:
- Road type
- Road name
- Road coordinates
- City boundaries
- Water way name
- Water way coordinates
I found that I could have all this information by using OpenStreetMap and my project begins to work. However, now I need to work on bigger maps (ie: bigger than the 50.000 XML nodes limit OSM export provides). I know I need to put the whole planet in a database.
There is a lot of documentation about PostgreSQL and OpenStreetMap on the Internet but I don't know where to begin. In fact I found documentation about Osmosis in order to put a planet dump in a database, but I also found about osm2pgsql. The point is I don't know what is the best for me.
It seems (but I can be wrong) osm2pgsql has been made in order to render mapnik maps, thing I don't need at all because I have to know roads/cities/water ways informations but I am not sure if I have correctly understood what mapnik can do.
What can I use to insert OSM data in a database in order to reuse it later as easily as an OSM exported file?
The computer I use is a dedicated server (Intel(R) Pentium(R) E2180 2.00GHz and 2GB of RAM) running a GNU/Linux Debian.
I know osmosis can insert but also extract a xml file from a database.