waiting_postgis_21

We had this big raster that we needed to chop up into tiles and only extract a portion of for load into PostGIS. raster2pgsql doesn't currently have an option to pull just a portion of a raster and also we don't have the windows raster2pgsql compiled with MrSID support. Luckily GDAL commandline gdal_translate has this switch that allows you to specify a chunk of a raster to grab based on a projected or unprojected box window. We wanted to grab just that portion that is part of boston and chunk it into bite size pieces. What we needed was a grid generator similar to what we described a while back in Map Dicing and other stuff that would chop our neighborhood into bite sized tiles we could then use to generate the relevant gdal_translate command. Instead of using temp tables and all that stuff, we decided to try with the ST_Tile raster function. Creating an empty raster and then tiling it.

In a nutshell, we're using PostGIS raster technology (ST_Tile function introduced in PostGIS 2.1) that we demonstrated in Waiting for PostGIS 2.1 ST_Tile to create a grid because PostGIS geometry doesn't have cool gridding function like SpatiaLite has :). SpatialLite tesselation. Perhaps in PostGIS 2.2 we'll see some of these SpatiaLite niceties. However ST_Tile does the trick fairly nicely and quickly. For this example took under 600 ms to generate 1524 rows of GDAL commands.

Following PostgreSQL's lead, I thought it would be nice to provide PostGIS manual in ePub format. It turned out not to be a lot of work, but probably a lot more to fine tune it. I've changed Debbie (a PostGIS build-bot) to build this format and publish to PostGIS site whenever a change to PostGIS 2.1. You can download from http://postgis.net/documentation. The link next to EPUB.

I would appreciate if people could try it out on their eReader devices. On my Android tablet it looks pretty good, and had the nice feature of when I clicked on the epub link to download it, it added it to my library. I can't figure out how to click on the links (probably because I just use my desktop). and table of contents seems to crash the reader. On my windows firefox ePub viewer, it looks pretty yucky but much easier to navigate. I guess there are a LOT of differences with ePub readers.

We've made our first huge milestone. With much of Steve Woodbridge's help and patience as well as support from pgRouting Windows campaign sponsors, we have windows PostgreSQL 9.2 binaries for the pgRouting 1.07 development branch for both PostgreSQL 32-bit and 64-bit. You can download these from: Winnie's 9.2 windows downloads. Details on how to install are described on Windows download page at bottom. Please give these a try to see if they work okay for you. These binaries will work for PostGIS 2+ releases as well as the experimental PostGIS 2.1 builds and upcoming PostGIS 2.1 release.

We are still missing payments from some pgRouting sponsors. So if you haven't sent us payment yet, please do so. If you weren't on the initial campaign and would still like to give, you can still contact us at lr at pcorp dot us to make payment arrangements. If you want to contribute, we ask you do $100 USD or more since smaller amounts are too much bookkeeping. Any additional money's will go toward work on pgRouting 2.0 (not just Windows but general support of the rewrite) and future buildbot upgrades.

Steve is now pushing further forward with upcoming pgRouting 2.0, so the pgRouting code base will soon be a bit volatile and unstable. We are still in middle of setting up the buildbot to automate the future builds and then come PostGIS 2.1, you can expect to see pgRouting included in the PostgreSQL 9.2+ PostGIS 2.1 application stack builder packages.