Entries by Regina Obe

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

GeoHipster interview with me came out today. Covers how I stumbled into database programming and my work on PostGIS, PostgreSQL and pgRouting. Interview with Regina Obe

Leo's pgRouting : a Crash Course video made it thru great. Better than mine. Leo doesn't believe in slides, so this is all live demo stuff. The data he used in the video is part of our code/data download for pgRouting: A Practical Guide.

The videos for FOSS4G NA 2016 have started coming out. Recently Andrea Ross posted PostGIS Spatial Tricks talk video. I'm happy to say it looks pretty good and I didn't suck as badly as I worried I would. Thank you very much Andrea. Some talks unfortunately did not come thru. I'm hoping Leo's pgRouting : a Crash Course video made it thru okay as well, and will post that later if it does.

Only small little nit-picks is the first 2-5 minutes or so didn't make it thru and the blue colors on the slides got a little drowned out, but here are the slides if you need full resolution.

pgRouting 2.2.3 was released last week. Main change is this version now supports PostgreSQL 9.6. Many thanks to Vicky Vergara for working thru the issues with PostgreSQL 9.6 and getting it to work. Vicky has also been doing a good chunk of the coding (a lot of Boost refactoring and integrating more Boost features), testing, and documentation in pgRouting, osm2pgrouting, and QGIS pgRoutingLayer in general for pgRouting 2.1, 2.2, and upcoming 2.3. We are very indebted to her for her hard work.

If you are a windows user testing the waters of PostgreSQL 9.6beta1, we have pgRouting 2.2.3 binaries and PostGIS 2.3.0dev binaries at http://postgis.net/windows_downloads.

PostgreSQL 9.6beta1 came out yesterday. It is the first version of PostgreSQL that will have parallel query support and PostGIS 2.3 will be the first PostGIS to support parallelism in queries. Although work is not yet committed in PostGIS repo to support this, you can expect to see this soon (currently here - https://github.com/pramsey/postgis/tree/parallel , waiting for someone to you know who you are do something about it.)

Because of the newness of the parallelization feature, there are some caveats. As with all big things, we expect there to be a lot of bugs, and the more eyeballs on those and real workloads we've got hammering on them, the sweeter the PostGIS 2.3.0 and PostgreSQL 9.6 release will be.

Binaries for Windows users

For windows users, winnie the PostGIS windows buildbot is now building PostGIS for 9.6. Get PostgreSQL 9.6 binaries and installers from PostgreSQL 9.6beta1 for windows.

Once you have that, just copy the contents of the respective PostGIS 2.3 9.6 binaries listed here - http://postgis.net/windows_downloads/ into your install folder.

In the extras folder, you'll also find ogr_fdw foreign data wrapper latest development version which we covered extensively in FOSS4GNA2016 PostGIS Spatial Tricks. Talk also covered some new PostGIS 2.3.0 stuff.

We don't have pgRouting binaries available yet. pgRouting team is working out some compatibility issues with PostgreSQL 9.6. Once those are resolved, we will publish pgRouting binaries as well.