gis

This year's PostGIS Day was on November 18, 2021. I celebrated like many others in a PostGIS day virtual conference. You can find the talks and videos at PostGIS Day 2021. Others celebrated with parties, food, and spirits. This was my favorite PostGIS Day conference ever. Each year just gets better.

If I were to sum up this year's conference I would say: A generous helping of code, lots of humor, and lots of people. Thanks Elizabeth Christensen, Paul Ramsey and Crunchy Data for putting this conference together. All talks were really good so hard to isolate just a couple.

Continue reading "PostGIS Day 2021 Highlights"

The Free and Open Source for GIS conference : FOSS4G 2021 Buenos Aires Online took place September 27th to October 2nd, 2021 online. Many of the videos from the conference (including mine on PostGIS) are at FOSS4G 2021 Playlist viewable online.

Continue reading "FOSS4G 2021 Buenos Aires Videos are out"

One of the new features coming in PostGIS 3.1 is fixed precision support. This new feature will require compilation with not yet released GEOS 3.9. There are a couple of functions already in PostGIS 3.1 that have this new feature -- they are ST_Subdivide, ST_Union, ST_SymDifference, ST_Union, and ST_UnaryUnion as summarized in What's new in PostGIS 3.1. To take advantage of these new to die for features, you'll need to have compiled your PostGIS with development GEOS 3.9 which is planned for release around the same time we get around to releasing PostGIS 3.1. Windows users can download binaries with GEOS 3.9 support from PostGIS windows experimental binaries

The ST_Union feature should improve a lot of cases where people ran into topological exceptions. Perhaps I'll demonstrate that in a separate article once I've given it a test drive.

Continue reading "Waiting for PostGIS 3.1: ST_Subdivide and other function support with fixed precision"

In a previous article Using pg upgrade to upgrade PostGIS without installing older version I demonstrated a trick for upgrading to a newer PostgreSQL instance from PostGIS 2.2 - 2.whatever without having to install the older version of PostGIS in your new PostgreSQL service. Unfortunately that trick does not work if coming from PostGIS 2.1 because in PostGIS 2.2 we renamed a c lib function that backed sql functions in 2.1.

Fear not. There is still a way to upgrade from 2.1 to 2.5 without installing an older version of PostGIS in your new PostgreSQL instance. To do so, you need to add a step and that is to remove the functions in 2.1 that are backed by this renamed lib function. In upcoming PostGIS 3.0, we've added this function back and have it throw an error so that even coming from PostGIS 2.1, you can upgrade just the same as you do from later versions.

Continue reading "Using pg_upgrade to upgrade PostgreSQL 9.3 PostGIS 2.1 to PostgreSQL 11 2.5 on Yum"

pgAdmin4 version 3.3 released this week comes with a PostGIS geometry viewer. You will be able to see the graphical output of your query directly in pgAdmin, provided you output a geometry or geography column. If your column is of SRID 4326 (WGS 84 lon/lat), pgAdmin will automatically display against an OpenStreetMap background.

We have Xuri Gong to thank for working on this as a PostGIS/pgAdmin Google Summer of Code (GSOC) project. We'd like to thank Victoria Rautenbach and Frikan Erwee for mentoring.

Continue reading "pgAdmin4 now offers PostGIS geometry viewer"

We've got customers discovering PostGIS and GIS in general or migrating away from ArcGIS family of tools. When they ask, "How do I see my data?", we often point them at QGIS which is an open source GIS desktop with rich integration with PostGIS/PostgreSQL.

QGIS is something that is great for people who need to live in their GIS environment since it allows for easily laying on other datasources, web services and maps. The DBManager tool allows for more advanced querying (like writing Spatial SQL queries that take advantage of the 100s of functions PostGIS has to offer) , ability to import/export data, and create PostgreSQL views.

QGIS has this thing called Projects, which allow for defining map layers and the symbology associated with them. For example what colors do you color your roads, and any extra symbols, what field attributes do you overlay - street name etc. Projects are usually saved in files with a .qgs or .qgz extension. If you spent a lot of time styling these layers, chances are you want to share them with other people in your group. This can become challenging if your group is not connected via network share.

Continue reading "New in QGIS 3.2 Save Project to PostgreSQL"

PostGIS 2.5 is just around the corner. One of the new functions coming is the ST_OrientedEnvelop. This is something I've been waiting for for years. It is the true minimum bounding rectangle, as opposed to ST_Envelope which is an axis aligned bounding rectable.

Below is a pictorial view showing the difference between the two.

Continue reading "Coming PostGIS 2.5 ST_OrientedEnvelope"

To commemorate PostGIS Day 2017, I put together a 3D scene listing my favorite functions.

You can see it PostGIS Day in 3D

PostGIS releases a new minor version of PostGIS every one or two years. Each minor version of postgis has a different libname suffix. In PostGIS 2.1 you'll find files in your PostgreSQL lib folder called postgis-2.1.*, rtpostgis-2.1.*, postgis-topology-2.1.*, address-standardizer-2.1.* etc. and in a PostGIS 2.2 you'll find similar files but with 2.2 in the name. I believe PostGIS and pgRouting are the only extensions that stamp the lib with a version number. Most other extensions you will find are just called extension.so e.g. hstore is always called hstore.dll /hstore.so even if the version changed from 9.6 to 10. On the bright side this allows people to have two versions of PostGIS installed in a PostgreSQL cluster, though a database can use at most one version. So you can have an experimental database running a very new or unreleased version of PostGIS and a production database running a more battery tested version.

On the sad side this causes a lot of PostGIS users frustration trying to use pg_upgrade to upgrade from an older version of PostGIS/PostgreSQL to a newer version of PostGIS/PostgreSQL; as their pg_upgrade often bails with a message in the loaded_libraries.txt log file something to the affect:

could not load library "$libdir/postgis-2.2": ERROR:  could not access file "$libdir/postgis-2.2": No such file or directory
could not load library "$libdir/postgis-2.3": ERROR:  could not access file "$libdir/postgis-2.3": No such file or directory

This is also a hassle because we generally don't support a newer version of PostgreSQL on older PostGIS installs because the PostgreSQL major version changes tend to break our code often and backporting those changes is both time-consuming and dangerous. For example the DatumGetJsonb change and this PostgreSQL 11 crasher we haven't isolated the cause of yet. There are several changes like this that have already made the PostGIS 2.4.0 we released recently incompatible with the PostgreSQL 11 head development.

Continue reading "Using pg_upgrade to upgrade PostGIS without installing an older version of PostGIS"

One of the things I'm most happy about with upcoming PostGIS 2.4.0, due out in about a week is that it is the first version to have almost complete translations into different languages. The Japanese, German, Portugese, and Korean translations are more than 80% complete with Japanese being 96%. You can download the html manuals from PostGIS docs page. Thwre are PDFs for non-Asian languages. Japanese and Korean languages I'm still having issue generating the pdfs.

When you install PostGIS with CREATE EXTENSION postgis;, it also installs the accompanying help extracted from the manual in English format.

The comment generator we have in place is just as happy working with translated docs as it is with the English one so the in db help documents can also be generated in other languages. The help files are located: Japanese, German, Portugese, and Korean

Continue reading "PostGIS db help and manual in different languages"

It's a little known fact that the PostGIS geography type since PostGIS 2.2 (well was introduced in 2.1 I think but had a bug in it until 2.1.4 or so), supports any spheroidal spatial reference system that measures in degrees. When an srid is not specified, it defaults to using 4326, Earth WGS 84 long lat.

Continue reading "geography type is not limited to earth"

Reminder: Right after the Free and Open Source GIS conference in Boston is the OSGeo / LocationTech code sprint on Saturday August 19th 9AM-5PM at District Hall where project members from various Open Source Geospatial projects will be fleshing out ideas, documenting, coding, and introducing new folks to open source development. All are welcome including those who are unable to make the conference.

We are getting a final head-count this week to plan for food arrangements. If you are planning to attend, add your name to the list https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2017_Code_Sprint#Registered_Attendees. If you are unable to add your name to the list, feel free to send Regina an email at lr@pcorp.us with your name and projects you are interested in so I can add you to the list. Looking forward to hanging out with folks interested in PostgreSQL and PostGIS development.

District Hall is a gorgeous community space. Check out the District Hall View http://bit.ly/2f61J8c

FOSS4G 2017 is just a few weeks away. Many of the workshops will utilize OSGeoLive as a means for workshop participants to get up and running quickly with OSGeo Free and Open Source GIS tools and Boston data. OSGeoLive11 is a LUbuntu 16.04 distribution. OSGeoLive11 is going thru the final stages of prep. You can download the OSGeoLiveRC1 ISO for it from http://aiolos.survey.ntua.gr/gisvm/11.0/osgeo-live-11.0rc1-amd64.iso.

Once OSGeoLive11 is fully prepped, it will be linked on the osgeolive site http://live.osgeo.org. If you want to run OSGeoLive11 from bootable media, you can burn the ISO to DVD or thumb drive and boot. In final prep, you can expect to have a Virtual Image ready to go you can host on Virtual Box or VMWare and make further customizations. OSGeoLive11 thumb drives will be handed out at the conference.

If you are doing any PostgreSQL/ PostGIS / pgRouting / or other GIS training, OSGeoLive is pretty handy. OSGeoLive11 contains PostgreSQL 9.5 (I know slightly dated) , PostGIS 2.3.2 and cli tools, pgRouting 2.4.1, and osm2pgrouting 2.2.0. In addition it contains popular GIS Desktop friends QGIS, OpenJump, gvSig, uDig as well as power tools like GRASS, R, GDAL CLI toolkit, and Jupyter notebooks. Mapping Servers MapServer and GeoServer. We'll be using pgRouting, osm2pgRouting, PostGIS, PostgreSQL, QGIS, and OpenJump in our workshop Problem Solving with pgRouting. A good chunk of FOSS GIS relies on PostgreSQL via PostGIS so you'll find a lot of already setup PostgreSQL databases on this disk.

For this set of exercises, we're going to go thru using the ISO media linked above on a Windows 7 VirtualBox setup. If you are using any other OS (e.g. Mac OSX, Linux, Unix), instructions should be much the same.

Continue reading "Using OSGeoLive with VirtualBox"

So PostgreSQL 10beta1 came out recently as Holly mentioned. When first mention of beta hits, things start getting serious for me. I have to make sure that PostGIS compiles against said distribution to make sure eager testers aren't held back.

As with other releases, PostGIS didn't compile against the new PostgreSQL version without some nurturing. We've still got one regress failure, but at least PostGIS 2.4 now compiles cleanly against PostgreSQL 10beta1. I'm hoping that we can release PostGIS 2.4.0 just in time for PostgreSQL 10 planned release in September so I don't have to backport PostgreSQL 10 patches I made to lower PostGIS versions.

For PostGIS 2.4 the main focus will be cleaning up the parallel work so that all aggregate functions can enjoy use of parallel optimization. This is even more important with PostgreSQL 10 now that more kinds of queries can benefit from parallelization work. I'm also hoping to focus more energy on the raster side of things.

Continue reading "PostGIS 2.4.0, Code Sprints and other extensions to try with PostgreSQL 10 beta1"

At PGConfUS 2017 last week, we presented a talk: Top 10 Problems Solved by PostGIS. The slides for the talk in HTML format and PDF format. The pgRouting examples at the end of the talk seemed to be the most popular.

We'll be giving a pgRouting workshop at FOSS4G Boston 2017 Aug 14-19th where we'll go into much more depth about topics like drive time analysis and Vehicle Route schedule planning (VRP). We also hope to give a talk at FOSS4G 2017 on PostGIS spatial tricks.