BostonGIS Blog

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.

One of the interesting things to come out this week is the SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP

One of the enhancements we are really looking forward to and interested in experimenting with is the Report Builder 3.0/Reporting Services support for Geospatial data. We hope to try out the SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP 1 in the next 2 or so weeks to test drive these features and maybe provide some reporting tutorials on BostonGIS.

One thing I am interested in seeing is whether the geospatial support can be leveraged for other spatial databases besides SQL Server. One thing I have to say is nice about the SQL Server add-ons like SSIS, Reporting Services etc. is that they can be used for other databases such as Oracle and PostgreSQL. Reporting Services has native drivers for Oracle and I believe Terradata and some others. It would be nice to implement similar drivers for PostgreSQL/MySQL and other open source databases. For most OS dbs, you usually have to use the ODBC driver,which is okay but not great. Its strange you can't use the ADO.NET driver, it seems you need a special Reporting Services provider driver, or at least we haven't been able to. It is possible to use the report builder in a stand alone mode (client mode -- no reporting services) and then I believe you can use ADO.NET drivers. We haven't played around with that but plan to.

To be honest we don't really use reporting services that much, but lately we have been forced into it since a lot of our bigger clients are married to it mostly because of the subscription support capabilities that allows you to mail reports on a scheduled basis to groups of users. The report builder isn't too bad either with some training. Its also tied in with other Microsoft stack things like Microsoft CRM/SharePoint etc. that many of our clients use so is a big part of their workflow.

We also want to check out how the spatial support has changed/improved since the SQL Server 2008 RTM.

More Database comparisons

We also just updated our basic comparison between SQL Server 2008, PostgreSQL 8.4, and MySQL 5.1 . This is not the spatial part, just general database features. It seems to be garnering a lot of traffic.

For our spatial compare that we did a while back. SQL Server 2008, PostGIS, MySQL, we'll probably repeat that exercise again when SQL Server 2008 R2 and PostGIS (1.5 or 2.0) come out. For our next iteration, we'll probably leave out MySQL since MySQL spatial support doesn't appear to have changed much. But instead we will replace with Oracle Spatial/Locator (and possibly Db II). Since more people seemed interested in how Oracle compares with the other two than how MySQL compares.