To GIS or Not to GIS... That is the Question

[craig thompson]

Okay folks I would call myself a newbie with the exception that I am old as dirt.

I have some young gun developers that are giving me differing opinions about a GIS problem we have.

We are currently running MySQL 5.0.89-community on a centos server.

My guys have an older version of Mysql running local on the machines. When they try to insert records with GIS data locally no prob. When they do the exact same on the server, they get garbage.

I have one guy who says that he thinks we are missing and extension in our MySQL, another who says we have what we need but there is a config issue, and I have a hosting company that says "Hey happy to help, just give us exact instructions for what you want us to do"

Are there any functions I can call that can tell me if I indeed have what I need in the build? Any other config calls I need to run to have what I need to explain it better here?

Any other input would be Great... Thanks Team.

Craig