BostonGIS Blog

Its official we will be giving two PostGIS mini-tutorials at PgCon East in Philadelphia late this month (March). Both will be on March 27th, preliminary calendar PostgreSQL Coneference East 2010 March 27th, 2010.

Marcus Rouhani of the FAA will also be talking about Airport GIS and use of PostgreSQL/PostGIS in that project. Interestingly, it looks like he's scheduled to talk on the same day we are.

Other PostGIS events. OSGEO just finished the New York City Sprint, where PostGIS was well represented, but sadly we were not able to make. Our summary of what we could glean from participants blogs (PostGIS highlights) are summarized at What is new in PostGIS.

On yet another note, we managed to scrape up some time to push out our customary cheat sheet guide to PostGIS 1.5. Hopefully we didn't leave out anything critical.

For those interested in buying PostGIS in Action, we have been informed that Manning is planning to have a one day sale 50% discount on all MEAP books this Friday, which in Manning time should be a an hour or so from now. They have a truly great line-up of upcoming books.

Its been a while since we've blogged on BostonGIS. We've been very busy as you can imagine.

Couple of quick updates:

• PostGIS 1.5.0 is finally out We are working on packaging the PostGIS Windows binaries and builds, which we hope to have ready sometime late next week. More details at PostgreSQL PostGIS and PL/R news
• PL/R now works with PostgreSQL 8.3/8.4 windows builds. Get the binaries here and instructions at the new and crisp PL/R Wiki .
• We've launched our PostGIS in Action booksite. We are down to the 3-2-1 count down of PostGIS in action chapters. Here you can find details about what is covered in each chapter. Get the code, the data, presentations we've done on PostGIS. We are still working out some annoying display issues on IE 6/7.
• Finally, we'll be presenting at PgCon East 2010 in Philadelphia March 25th-28th 2010. More details on that later as the story unfolds.

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.