Route Miles

We use PCMiler and Rand McNally products, but they certainly aren't free. Both
programs have good API's and run on Linux, which is of interest to us. We
have the mileage lookup functionality integerated in to trigger code with C
functions that do the work. I don't know of any free products. For us, we
would have to use the products above because the customers demand
calculations based on a commerical product.

On Friday 09 September 2005 09:31 am, Jim Buttafuoco saith:

On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 10:13 -0400, Terry Lee Tucker wrote:

we would have to use the [non-free] products above because
the customers demand calculations based on a commercial product.

Are you saying that customers demand that you use a non-free product, or
are you saying that customers demand a certain functionality that you
have found only in a non-free product?

Matt,

This is a logistics package and we move freight for customers for a fee. Quite
often that fee is based on the number of miles traveled. The vast majority of
our customers demand that we calculate their rate using either PCMiler or
Rand McNally. A handful use their own mileage calcuations and we have to use
their data. The functionality is irrevelent to the customer. We simply use
the mileage program whenever possible such that the mileages are
automatically entered as the people in operations enter the freight records.

On Friday 09 September 2005 10:40 am, Matt Miller saith:

Terry,

How easy is it to get the route miles from one zip to another using with PCMiler or Rand McNally. Is it just a query on
some route table ie: select miles from route where zip1 = '11111' and zip2 = '22222'. Also do either of these cover Canada?

Thanks
Jim

---------- Original Message -----------
From: Terry Lee Tucker <terry@esc1.com>
To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Sent: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 10:49:59 -0400
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Route Miles

Matt,

This is a logistics package and we move freight for customers for a fee. Quite
often that fee is based on the number of miles traveled. The vast majority of
our customers demand that we calculate their rate using either PCMiler or
Rand McNally. A handful use their own mileage calcuations and we have to use
their data. The functionality is irrevelent to the customer. We simply use
the mileage program whenever possible such that the mileages are
automatically entered as the people in operations enter the freight records.

On Friday 09 September 2005 10:40 am, Matt Miller saith:

On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 10:13 -0400, Terry Lee Tucker wrote:

we would have to use the [non-free] products above because
the customers demand calculations based on a commercial product.

Are you saying that customers demand that you use a non-free product, or
are you saying that customers demand a certain functionality that you
have found only in a non-free product?

---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster

------- End of Original Message -------

Jim,

It is fairly easy to do with both products. The PCMiler API is better, but
doesn't support socket connections to the server. It basically works like
this:

1. Open a connection to the server.
2. Validate the city name/zip code.
3. Look up miles.
4. Close the connection.

All of this is accomplished by making functionc calls vi the API. As I said,
PCMiler has the best API.

Both products support Canadian postal codes.

HTH...

On Friday 09 September 2005 12:37 pm, Jim Buttafuoco saith: