Update to Install instructions for PostGIS 2.0 more coming

We finally got around to updating our Part 1: Getting Started With PostGIS: An almost Idiot's Guide for PostGIS 2.0. We kept the 1.5 around so is still accessible under Part 1: Getting Started With PostGIS: An almost Idiot's Guide (PostGIS 1.5).

The Part 2: Introduction to Spatial Queries in the series was even more outdated and was using functions removed in 2.0 and long deprecated since around PostGIS 1.3. We've updated this as well, but still cleaning it up a bit and verifying we didn't make any typos in the code.

We hope to augment these tutorials with similar ones for raster and topology. Some of the misconceptions people have about working with raster in PostGIS 2.0 that we've noticed are:

• It is somehow different if you are on windows vs. Unix/Linux. This is not true. In fact the raster2pgsql command-line tool makes the process pretty much the same regardless of what OS you are on.
• People use raster2pgsql to generate an SQL file and then try to load it with pgAdmin and pgAdmin crashes. Sorry folks, pgAdmin is not the right tool for the job, it's not designed for loading up a 1 GB sql file in SQL Query browser and running it. Frankly you don't even need to bother with generating an intermediary SQL file - just pipe straight to psql. Works for all OS including Windows.
• How to display PostGIS raster with external tools. The story there is still in infancy. Yes you can sorta do it with MapServer, QGIS etc, but its kinda slow at the moment. GeoServer might be better using the GeoTools option, but I haven't had the time to play with all the options. Another option I wanted to experiment with is one suggested by a client of ours publishing PostGIS raster as a tile based store similar to what is done with MBTiles. That has some allure since PostGIS raster can be loaded as chunked tiles with the loader to make analysis faster. So although it's really slick for vector/raster analysis there is no reason I see it can't play kinda dumb as well when its convenient and smart again when the need arises simply by using the output PNG/tiff etc functions as wrappers for tile output. Those functions are fairly fast. :).
• Oh yah and it's about analysis not display. I know Paul, but some of us don't live in caves though I admit I do :)

Anyway we'll go thru these lessons in raster tutorials to follow and hopefully I'll have a better story with displaying PostGIS raster with third-party tools after some experimentation and some issues in the PostGIS GDAL driver have been resolved.

New book coming

Yap we just finished the first draft of our new book PostgreSQL: Up and Running and are patiently tweed-ling our thumbs for pre-reviews to come in. It's a short only about 150 pages in length (so far anyway) and we hope to have it on shelves in the next couple of months - both e-book and hard-copy. It will be published by O'Reilly Media and follows their new experimental standard similar in flavor to their HTML 5: Up and Running book.

The difference with this kind of book, is they are generally shorter and more focused because who wants to spend time reading or writing a tome that is almost guaranteed to be out of date by the time it hits the shelf. So the writing cycle is in theory shorter which means less risk for the publisher and the author to write a book that may not have as major of an audience. The other benefit is the e-Book formats of these books can always be kept up to date. So assuming you trust us as authors to continually update the material, if you buy an e-Book version of this title, you'll get any updates we write to it without shelling out extra dough. Of course if you go the standard of buying the hard-copy version you get it only at print cycles and just for that print. It's an interesting business model. We'll see how it goes and if it goes well we'll write other books of a similar flavor.

So Is "PostgreSQL Up and Running" for beginners? Yes and No. Our main audience target are people coming from other relational databases such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, SQLite etc. and why the heck is using PostgreSQL the best decision you ever made :) . It is also for people who have used PostgreSQL but have a hard time keeping up with enhancements in newer versions of PostgreSQL and how to prepare and take advantage of them. The first release will target 9.1 and 9.2 series and if all goes well, we'll keep it up to date with newer versions as they come.