Essential PostgreSQL Refcard is out
We've been working on writing our book on PostGIS PostGIS in Action. We have also been working on an Essential PostgreSQL DZone RefCardz to both provide free publicity for our upcoming book and also to hopefully serve a greater good to the PostgreSQL community. We are pleased to announce that the RefCard is finally done and out on the street. We still have a ways to go with the book (slaving on chapter 8), but we hope the RefCard will be a nice companion to our book. The RefCardz is available for free download at Essential PostgreSQL http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/essential-postgresql?oid=hom12841.
If you've never looked at a DZone RefCard, we encourage you to. They are basically 6 pages of the most important (well at least what the author thought) need to know about a piece of software or technology. They also make attractive handouts at conferences. We did an Essential PostgreSQL because we felt there was a greater audience that could benefit from that card not just in the spatial community, but in the PostgreSQL community at large. We hope to do one later targeting PostGIS. It would be neat if similar cards could be done for other common Open source GIS tools such as Mapserver, Geoserver, and OpenLayers.
New on the PostGIS front
Paul has managed to sneak in Geography support in the upcoming PostGIS 1.5. There isn't much to see yet except ability to create geography using PostgreSQL typmod syntax, do bounding box queries, convert back and forth between geometry and geography. You can think of the new geography counterpart as native geodetic support similar to geography in SQL Server 2008. It will eventually have ST_Distance and ST_DWithin functionality and hopefully that will make it into PostGIS 1.5. We'll be providing experimental windows builds of this in the next week or so.
