Not so spherical mercator? SRID 3857?
Hi folks,
Spent some time yesterday getting schooled on all the politics of last year's EPSG 3785 to 3857 swap. I guess they just don't like that sphere (or rather the math). I was wondering first off if anyone had the 11gR2 CS inserts for 3857. I saw a post that Mike Horhammer was working on doing this last spring. How about the Oracle folks? Will 3857 be showing up soon as a stock SRID? Being WGS84 based it probably not that big a deal to set up but I was just hoping someone else had it handy.
Secondly, any idea how this change will work in practice? The EPSG has not only created the new SRID but they definitively retired the old. There is no mention of 3785 in the EPSG database any longer and ideally this number could be recycled to some other purpose at any time. So what happens now to the old Spherical Mercator cs? Someone over there at Oracle took all the trouble to code the new spherical math routines into SDO_CS for 11gR2. This came to my attention via looking at the situation at ESRI. They seem to be just accepting that there are now two Web Mercator coordinate systems. In the 9.3 product 3785 = 102113 and 3857 = 102100. ArcGIS 10 just uses 3785 and 3857. I am not sure what happens if 3785 get recycled to some other purpose at EPSG. Will Oracle also retain 3785 and just add 3857 and thus have the two Web Mercator coordinate systems? It seems like deleting 3785 could create some problems.
Anyhow, interested in any thoughts or suggestions you all have on the matter.
Cheers,
Paul