Release 9 for Fast GIS

Release 9


A Partial List...

  • Absolute Value
  • Areas
  • Arithmetic Functions
  • Aspect
  • Logarithms
  • Bessel Functions
  • Between
  • Binary Functions
  • Blur
  • Boolean Functions
  • Bounds
  • Branch
  • Buffer
  • Ceilings
  • Center Functions
  • Compare Order
  • Complementary Error Function
  • Compose Circle
  • Compose GML
  • Compose GeoJSON
  • Compose Point with Z
  • Compose Point
  • Compose Rectangle
  • Compose Segment
  • Compose Triangle
  • Compose WKT
  • Concatenate
  • Convert to Area
  • Convert to Line
  • Convert to Point
  • Convex Hull
  • Date Functions
  • Decompose to Branches
  • Decompose to Coordinates
  • Decompose to Segments
  • Direction Blur
  • Direction Edges
  • Distance
  • Edges
  • Enclosing Box
  • Error Function
  • Escape, JSON
  • Exponent
  • Floors
  • Fractional Parts
  • Gamma Function
  • Gaussian Blur
  • Geoms with Curves
  • Geoms with Z
  • Hyperbolic Trig
  • Hypotenuse
  • Is NULL
  • Is not NULL
  • JSON Array
  • JSON Boolean
  • JSON Number
  • JSON Object
  • JSON String
  • Length
  • Like
  • Linearize
  • Log-gamma Function
  • Lower Case
  • Merge Areas
  • Merge Lines
  • Merge Points
  • Modulo
  • Multiply
  • Negate
  • Noise
  • Normalize Topology
  • Normalize
  • Number of Branches
  • Number of Characters
  • Number of Coordinates
  • Number of Regexp Matches
  • Orthogonalize
  • Pad Functions
  • Parse GML Coordinate System
  • Parse GML
  • Parse GeoJSON Coordinate System
  • Parse GeoJSON
  • Parse WKB
  • Parse WKT
  • Points
  • Power Functions
  • Reciprocal Cube Root
  • Reciprocal Square Root
  • Regexp Match
  • Remove Curves
  • Remove Z
  • Replace Regexp
  • Reverse Text
  • Rotate
  • Round
  • Scale
  • Segmentize
  • Set Z
  • Sharpen
  • Shift
  • <
  • Slope
  • Smooth
  • Subtract
  • Tangent
  • Text Contains
  • Text Cut
  • Text Ends with
  • Text Matches Regexp
  • Text Position, Nth
  • Text Position
  • Text Sounds like
  • Text Starts with
  • Text at End
  • Text at Start
  • Title Case
  • Translate Characters
  • Trigonometry
  • Trim
  • Truncate
  • Unescape JSON
  • Union Areas
  • Union Boxes
  • Upper Case
  • Vector Value
  • Voronoi Diagram
  • and many more...

Superior Analytics

Better Insights from the Best Data Science GIS

Understand Everything

Manifold® Release 9 provides breathtaking depth and clarity of insights into your data by automating difficult analytics within point-and-click dialogs and encapsulating Math God genius within powerful SQL functions. Use the power of Manifold to reveal all secrets your data contains. For only $145, fully paid, get the most powerful data science GIS ever created.

Release 9 is built upon Manifold's massively parallel Radian® spatial database platform, by far the world's richest, fastest and most powerful desktop spatial data engineering engine, decades beyond old-fashioned, single-threaded, "geodatabase" technology.

Doing data science or other serious work with spatial data? See the SQL: Manifold vs. Arc page for why Manifold's superb spatial SQL is a better choice than Esri's subset of SQL.

Right: Manifold analytic templates in the Transform pane provide previews. The illustration shows a preview of a viewshed calculation for a 6000 meter distance from each of two observers, falling within the 6 km radius circles. The blue preview areas show regions visible in the terrain from either fo the observers. The preview is shown using a split screen, where the preview border has been dragged toward the middle to show part of the window with no preview. From the Viewsheds topic in the User Manual.

Far Faster than Older Tools

Manifold runs dramatically faster than older GIS packages, often doing in minutes or even seconds what takes hours in AcGIS Pro or days in QGIS. The following extensive quotation from a Manifold user is a typical real life example. What took two and a half days in ArcPy and often required re-running now runs in only 15 minutes in Manifold with no re-runs required.

"I just wanted to briefly acknowledge the dedication and hard work of the Manifold team. On an off I have been tinkering with a process to produce indicative coastal inundation layers for our hazards team using coastal LiDAR to produce a series of ‘flood’ extents at a series of inundation heights above mean sea level.

I started off with a script from one of our ArcMap users which processed the sample dataset (~19500 x 35500 px ) and produced the 30 inundation layers in ~60 hours. Once run, the DEM often required fixing and the process rerunning due to ‘leaks’ resulting from pixel generalisation along river embankments. Anyway, following the addition of the distance toolset, I ported the process to Manifold 9 which immediately slashed the processing time to around 45 minutes.

Following on from this thread, the TileMaskRange function was introduced. I had earmarked this to try as an alternative in the inundation script and with the recent lockdown in NZ have finally found the time to incorporate it.

This function and some other simplifications available in recent builds have not only made the script much simpler, but also brought the total runtime using the same data and methodology as the ArcPy original down to a much more respectable 15 minutes (x240 speedup ). Thanks Manifold. Nice one.

The M9 toolset also allowed me to put together another project which identifies potential leaks before running the inundation tool so no more need to rerun the process." - Forum post

Multiple Data Sources - Simultaneously

Mix data from any number of different data sources seamlessly. Blend and analyze in the same query data from Oracle, PostgreSQL, shapefiles, the Cloud, WMS servers, local storage and many more formats and data sources.

"There is not much GIS in what I am doing, however there is a great deal of relational database work. [...] Using Manifold, I can import tables from both Ms-Access and from Postgres and write queries that use data from both backends. I cannot do this in pgAdmin or in dBeaver [...] In Manifold, I can also drag data from gpkg files into postgres..." - Forum post

Handles All Data Types

Manifold effortlessly handles all data types you need for analysis, including sophisticated spatial analysis: Vector data and complex, multi-channel, multi-type rasters, curvilinear geometry, Z values and any pixel type, with all the infrastructure like specialized indexes and coordinate system functions you need for fast and accurate analytics.

Automatically use every core

Automatically, Massively Parallel SQL

Manifold SQL automatically runs fully CPU-parallel and massively GPU-parallel. Queries and computations made with queries automatically take advantage of multiple CPU and multiple GPU cores for astonishing analytic speed in complex calculations.

Hundreds of Functions

Hundreds of parallelized, GPU-enabled analytic and other functions to edit, manipulate, analyze and transform data. Functions transform and analyze rasters, vector data, and traditional data types with blistering speed.

Point and Click Templates

Point-and-click Transform dialogs with easy templates to manipulate and transform data, all enabled for parallelization and GPGPU parallelization.

Right: The Transform pane provides point and click templates with a wide variety of options. The illustration shows using an SQL expression based on the CFS field for the radius of a buffer.

Pluggable Scripts

Mix and match scripts with SQL to achieve any task: Manifold includes built-in Javascript, C#, JScript, JScript.NET, VB.NET and VBScript plus automatic support for IronPython, IronRuby, F#, PerlScript and PythonScript when installed.

virtuoso Spatial Functions

Manifold's sophisticated parallelized spatial operators, like topology and spatial overlays, work with mixed objects, pathological geometry and do not require special data cleaning or simplification before use.

Scripting in Your Language

Manifold supports scripting in ten popular scripting languages, providing "always on" scripting in many languages. Script a custom function and call it from SQL or call an SQL parallel function from a script.

Breathtaking Visualization

Visualize spatial data as raster images, vector drawings and in maps,using parallelization to boost display performance.

On the Fly Formatting

Extensive, on-the-fly styling of vector data and rasters without changing data, even readonly data, with recombination of multi-channel data, ranges within channels, palettes, hill shading and other features.

Automatic Previews

See what an operator does before you commit the change. Visual previews throughout Manifold - in tables, drawings, images and maps - prevent errors and wasted workflow. Images at right show how a point and click Buffers template is previewed in blue preview color in the map.

Our Place or Yours?

Execute queries that mix and match Manifold functions and SQL with what an external query engine can do: Use Manifold within Oracle or vice versa. Manifold slices queries for dispatch where you want.

Hunting Neolithic Relics See Radian technology in action Watch the Hunting Neolithic Relics YouTube video showing how to use point and click templates in Manifold Viewer to create a map of Neolithic relics in France. Connect to your inner Indiana Jones and find 5000 year old emissaries from the Neolithic in France that no tourist knows about. Try it yourself with Manifold Viewer.

Location, Location, Location

Automatic support for over 6500 different coordinate systems and over 1500 coordinate system transformations, including all of EPSG and numerous other spatial reference systems. SQL and Template functions provide full convertability between GeoJSON, WKB, WKT, GML and other systems as well as extensive support for parallelized coordinate system transformations for rasters and vectors.

Perfect Precision

Exceptionally high precision coordinate system and base coordinate system transformations including all standard high precision routines used worldwide.

Point and Click Ease

Analysis becomes easier when Manifold does the hard work for you. Manifold provides a seamless range of capabilities starting with point-and-click dialogs that provide access to hundreds of functions in database manipulation of text, numeric and other types, mathematics, spatial functions, raster analytics and many more. Templates automatically keep track of spatial infrastructure such as coordinate systems.

Manifold's point and click functions also automatically launch parallelized operations that take advantge of all the CPU cores you have and will dispatch massively parallel computations to thousands of GPU cores if installed. If no GPU is installed, the computation automatically executes as parallel tasks on multiple CPU cores.

Point and Click Plus SQL

Even better, if we like we can combine the point and click infrastructure of templates with an expression in SQL to get the convenience of point and click support plus the power of customization using expressions.

At right we clicked the Expression tab and dropped an expression in that creates buffers just for roads that are classed as Major roads. That too gets a live preview the moment we write the expression.

Let Manifold Write Your SQL

Want to see how a point-and-click template works? Click the Edit Query button and Manifold launches a command window loaded with the SQL the template executes so you can see what functions are being used. It's a live query, so you can customize the SQL as you like or copy and paste into new queries.

If you prefer you can use a hybrid between point and click dialogs and full SQL by launching expressions within the point-and-click dialog. It's easy, it's fast and it's all blistering powerful by the massively parallel automation Manifold automatically applies.

Manifold automatically parallelizes and dispatches as many tasks as make sense to GPGPU, with automatic fallback to parallelized tasks dispatched to multiple CPU cores if a GPU is not available.

Automatic Power

GPGPU acceleration works everywhere in Manifold SQL where worthwhile work arises: in the SELECT list, in WHERE, in EXECUTE, ...everywhere. For example, if you add to a table a computed field that combines multiple tiles together, that computed field will use GPGPU. If you do some tile math in a FUNCTION, that FUNCTION will use GPGPU as well.

You don't have to write something special or learn programming environments like CUDA. Use the same SQL you already know and Manifold automatically parallelizes it to use GPGPU. If you don't use SQL but prefer point-and-click Manifold templates, those automatically use GPGPU as well.

When you write something like SELECT tilea + tileb ∗ 5 + tilec ∗ 8 FROM ..., the Radian engine takes the expression with three additions and two multiplications, generates GPGPU code for that function in a Just In Time, JIT manner and uploads the resulting code to GPGPU to execute the computations.

To save execution time and boost efficiency, JIT code generation for GPGPU functions is cache-friendly for the driver. Running the same query again, or even running different queries for which the GPGPU expressions are sufficiently similar to each other, will engage the compilation cache maintained by the driver

If you save the project using that computed field or FUNCTION into a Manifold .map file and then bring that .map file onto a machine running Manifold that has no GPGPU, the computed field will be executed by Manifold automatically falling back to using Manifold's CPU parallelism, taking advantage of as many CPU cores are available using CPU core parallelism instead of GPGPU. If you bring the .map file back onto a machine that has a GPGPU Manifold will automatically use the GPGPU.

Other optimizations play along transparently. If a particular subexpression inside of an expression that runs on GPGPU is a constant in the context of that expression, it will only be evaluated once. If an expression that can run on GPGPU refers to data from multiple tables and has parts that only reference one of these tables, the join optimizer will split the GPGPU expression into pieces according to dependencies and will run these pieces separately and at different times, minimizing work. A SELECT with more than one thread will run multiple copies of GPGPU expressions simultaneously. There are many other similar optimizations automatically integrated with GPGPU utilization.

Some operations are so trivial in terms of computational requirements it makes no sense to dispatch them to GPGPU, the classic case being scalars (trivial) as opposed to tiles (more bulk). CASE expressions, conditionals and similar constructions or functions that operate on scalar values stay on the CPU while functions that operate on tile values generally go to GPGPU unless they use tiles in a trivial fashion, such as making a simple comparison.

Various channel Combinations for an RGB image

Above: The Style dialog for rasters enables instant combinations and recombinations of channel data, as seen above in an RGB image from this topic in the User Manual.

Visual Raster Analytics

Manifold handles multichannel raster data effortlessly, and allows recombination of channel data with fine control over ranges, autocontrast spreads, values, methods and many other controls. This allows altering the presentation and recombination of channels to provide immediate insights and to generate spectacular visualizations.

Nothing is Too Complicated

If you are doing computations Manifold massively parallel GPU power is fast. Really fast. Gains are usually from 20 times faster to 100 times faster running typical computations on low end, dirt cheap GPU cards. Running complex computations on faster cards, performance is often 100 to 200 times faster than using CPU alone. It's fairly common to do in a second or two what takes more than five minutes without Manifold.

If your time is worth more than minimum wage and you're doing anything that requires your machine to think at a higher level than your coffee pot timer, you'll often pay back the cost of a Manifold license the first time you use it for anything serious. It's that fast. Nothing else comes close.


Manifold Commander

New! Automate Complex Jobs with Manifold® Commander

New ! Manifold® Commander is a console application version of Manifold that provides the full range of Manifold query and scripting capabilities from a command line, making it easy to automate tasks.

Commander launches from a command line such as in a Windows Command Prompt window, or in a .bat batch file, or from a Windows PowerShell script, from within Windows Task Manager to automate tasks.  Commander can run either SQL queries or scripts from within a specified .map file, and Commander also can run scripts from a specified script file stored outside a Manifold project. Script in ten different languages!

    Automate complex jobs using SQL
  • Your own Automated Factory - Commander provide an automated production line for accomplishing nearly any GIS, DBMS or ETL task. String together any of hundreds of functions using whatever logic you want in a sequence of SQL queries, or use scripts in any of ten different programming languages. Manifold features like the Transform pane will automatically write SQL that accomplishes what you've set up using point and click templates. It's like being able to tell a factory full of robots what you want them to do.
  • Built into Universal and Server Editions - Manifold Release 9 Universal and Server licenses include Manifold Commander. Installing either Release 9 Universal or Release 9 Server automatically installs Manifold Commander. When you buy Release 9 Universal for $195 you automatically get Manifold Commander as well. There is no need to make any additional purchases to get Commander.
  • Replace Costly and Slow ETL Tools - Commander is Manifold, so just like Manifold it runs fully parallel, with incredible parallel CPU and massively parallel GPU speed. Queries and scripts provide access to the full power of Manifold, enabling use of hundreds of Manifold functions and the full power of SQL and scripts to interact with data in databases or in any of hundreds of formats and data sources, to transform that data, do analyses, and save the transformed data or results or output to desired formats. Replace costly, non-parallel tools like FME at a fraction of the price.
  • Schedule Tasks - Using Windows Task Scheduler you can launch tasks using Commander on a regular schedule, such as updating a CSV every night for serving to clients, updating databases, or converting files into different formats.

See the Manifold Commander user manual topic for details and illustrated, step by step examples.


Experience Manifold Power in a Free Tool

Manifold Viewer is completely free - no need to register, no ads, no upsell, no soliciting donations - it's really free!

Manifold Viewer is the free, read-only version of Manifold Release 9. Although Viewer cannot write projects or save edited data back out to the original data sources, Viewer provides phenomenal capability to view and to analyze almost all possible different types of data in tables, vector geometry, raster data, drawings, maps and images from thousands of different sources. Viewer includes full SQL as well, with hundreds of spatial and other analytic functions.

Viewer can also create and write spatial indices for entire folders full of LiDAR files, save connections to favorite files and data sources, and even edit and save localization files to translate Manifold into new languages.

Manifold Viewer delivers a truly useful, fully CPU-parallel and GPU-parallel Manifold tool that gives you parallel power and endless Manifold capabilities at zero cost. No need to register, no adware, no requests for donations and no selling: use Viewer however you like, including commercial purposes. You can even redistribute Viewer, all for free.

Viewer is a great way to share the amazing projects you create in Manifold for free. Publish multi-hundred GB projects created in Manifold that anybody can pop open in 1/10th second for free using Viewer. Publish projects that include automatic connections to your organization's databases and worldwide webserved data, and include pre-built, sophisticated analytics and dynamic reporting that users can launch with a point and click. Track pandemics, help first responders fight wildfires, or just help your organization do a better job.

See Manifold Viewer in Action.

Viewer's small download (only 50 MB), instant launch, and clean display - free of convoluted ribbons and endless, confusing buttons - make it perfect for unskilled users. With Viewer a million people can share the dazzling analytics and insights you create with an inexpensive Manifold license, all at fully parallel speed with no need to pay for costly, cloud-based, web processing. Like Manifold, Viewer never crashes, no matter how big or complicated the job.

See Viewer in action Watch the Manifold Viewer Introduction YouTube video.

"Mfd 9 is becoming a really good tool for sharing data with non-GIS folks. Clean interface makes it easy to teach others simple tasks. Easy to transfer a project. Easy to install software. Free viewer." - Forum post

Get Manifold Viewer


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Re-projection on the fly

Manifold will automatically re-project layers as necessary for display in maps. Above a map containing a Bing web-served image from a Manifold imageserver dataport is in pseudo-Mercator projection. The layer above shows terrain elevation data for that portion of Florida as an image, originally in Latitude / Longitude projection but automatically re-reprojected by Manifold to match the pseudo-Mercator coordinate system used by Bing, maintaining perfect geo-registration. Manifold also colored the terrain data on-the-fly with a custom, user-specified palette.

About Manifold

Manifold is a deep technology company creating advanced, parallel algorithms, next-level technology, and computation know-how that powers faster performance and smarter operations.

License Manifold® technology to power your company's products, or take advantage of Manifold's off-the-shelf commercial products. Jump decades ahead of your competition.

Manifold® brand products deliver quality, performance and value in the world's most sophisticated, most modern, and most powerful spatial products for GIS, ETL, DBMS, and Data Science. Total integration ensures ease of use, amazing speed, and unbeatably low cost of ownership. Tell your friends!

Questions? Contact sales@manifold.net. We're happy to help!