waiting_postgis_23

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.

We'd like to give a big thanks to Olivier Courtin and Oslandia for organizing this year's OSGeo Code Sprint in Paris. It was quite memorable and I walked away feeling energized.

Leo and I attended the Paris OSGeo Code Sprint for 1.5 days. I'm really glad we were able to attend at least part of it. It would have been nicer to attend all of it. Though we didn't get too much done while there, we did have some interesting conversations and learned about what others were doing. I walked out with a TO DO list, of which I'm happy to say I've accomplished some of now.

While we were there Leo spent time cleaning up my Mingw64 compile scripts and starting to test PostGIS against PostgreSQL 9.6 in preparation for parallelization testing of PostGIS 2.3 features specifically targetted for PostgreSQL 9.6.

PostGIS 2.3 is still in its incubation, but I suspect it will be even more impressive than PostGIS 2.2. PostGIS 2.2 was long in the oven, and out came out a lot, but I'm hoping PostGIS 2.3 will have a shorter gestation period, but be just as, if not more impressive than PostGIS 2.2.

Before starting my "what's already there and what I hope to be there" list for PostGIS 2.3, I'll point out things that PostGIS 2.2 brought

PostGIS 2.2 offerings

Many itemized in PostGIS 2.3 new features

• KNN for geography and 3D geometries
• Geometry clustering functions
• True distance KNN for PostgreSQL 9.5+. If you are using 9.5, your KNN is not just bounding box distance, but true real distance.
• Faster topology, now a lot has been moved into C for better performance.
• Lots more 3D advanced functions via SFCGAL, SFCGAL now installable as extension.
• Lots of new geometry functions like geometry clustering, geometry clipping, subdivide, trajectory functions
• More raster stats and create overview table function without having to rely on raster2pgsql
• Tiger geocoder updated for Tiger 2015 data. Address standardizer now part of PostGIS.
• Last but not least, we added Dan Baston to our Core Contributor list. He gave us all the clustering functions in PostGIS 2.2, fixed lots of bugs and is already got more commits and proposed plans than anyone else for PostGIS 2.3. Go Dan go, and welcome.