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I gave a talk at PGConf US 2019 on some of the many ways you can load data into PostgreSQL using open source tools. This is similar to the talk I gave last year but with the addition of the pgloader commandline tool and the http PostgreSQL extension.

HTML slides PDF slides

Even though it was a talk Not much about PostGIS, but just tricks for loading data, I managed to get a mouthful of PostGIS in there.

PostGIS 2.5.1 was released on November 18th 2018 and I finished off packaging the PostGIS 2.5.1 windows builds and installers targeted for PostgreSQL EDB distribution this weekend and pushing them up to stackbuilder. This covers PostgreSQL 9.4-11 64-bit and PostgreSQL 95-10 (32bit).

Note that PostGIS 2.5 series will be the last of the PostGIS 2s. Goodbye PostGIS 2.* and start playing with the in-development version of PostGIS 3. Snapshot binaries for PostGIS 3.0 windows development are also available on the PostGIS windows download page. These should work for both BigSQL and EDB distributions.

Leo and I attended PostgresVision 2018 which ended a couple of days ago.

We gave a talk on spatial extensions with main focus being PostGIS. Here are links to our slides PostgresVision2018_SpatialExtensions HTML version PDF.

Unfortunately there are no slides of the pgRouting part, except the one that says PGRouting Live Demos because Leo will only do live demos. He has no fear of his demos not working.

Side note, if you are on windows and use the PostGIS bundle, all the extensions listed in the PostGIS box of the spatial extensions diagram, as well as the pointcloud, pgRouting, and ogr_fdw are included in the bundle.

We gave a PostGIS Intro Training and a PostGIS talk at PGConfUS 2016 in Brooklyn, New York and just got back. A number of people asked if we'd make the slides and material available. We have these posted on our presentation page: http://www.postgis.us/presentations and will be putting on the PostgreSQL Wiki as well in due time. There will be a video coming along for the talk, but the training was not recorded.

We also have two more talks coming up in North Carolina in Early May at FOSS4G NA 2016 - one on PostGIS Spatial Tricks which has more of a GIS specialist focus than the top 10 talk we gave, but there will be some overlap. The other talk is a topic a couple of people asked us in training and after our talk, on routing along constrained paths. If you are attending FOSS4G NA 2016, you won't want to miss our talk pgRouting: A Crash Course which is also the topic of our upcoming book.

Just like FOSS4G NA 2015, there is a pgDay track which is PostgreSQL specific material, useful to a spatial crowd, but not PostGIS focused.

Things are shaping up nicely in PostGIS 2.2 development. We are going to hit feature freeze around June 30th 2015, and plan to ship late August or early September to be in line with PostgreSQL 9.5 release. So far we have committed a couple of neat features most itemized in PostGIS 2.2 New Functions. Many of the really sort after ones will require PostgreSQL 9.5 and GEOS 3.5. The geography measurement enhancements will require Proj 4.9.0+ to take advantage of. Things I'd like to highlight and then later dedicate full-length articles in our BostonGIS Waiting for PostGIS 2.2 series once they've been stress tested.

This christmas I received something very special from Paul Ramsey and Even Roualt as detailed in Foreign Data Wrappers for PostGIS. It's been something I've been patiently waiting for for 4 years. I think it has a few issues I'm working to replicate, but overall it's much faster than I expected and pretty slick.

So why is ogr_fdw so special, because GDAL/OGR is an avenue to many data sources, NOT JUST GEOSPATIAL. It's the NOT JUST that I am most excited about. Though the focus is geospatial you can use it with non-geospatial datasources, as we described a long time ago in OGR2OGR for data loading

PGDay 2015 San Francisco will be held March 10th 2015 in Hyatt, San Franciso Airport, Burlingame, CA (Just outside of San Francisco). This year PGDay will be hosted along-side Free and Open Source Geospatial North America (FOSS4GNA) conference 2015 which runs March 9th-12th and EclipseCon NA 2015. Speaker submissions for FOSS4GNA 2015 and EclipseCon NA 2015 will end this Monday November 17th, 2014.

A while back, we discussed using pgAdmin pgScript as a quicky way for running a repetitive update script where you want each loop to commit right away. Since stored functions have to commit as a whole, you can't use stored functions alone for this kind of processing.

Question: Can you do similar easily with psql?
Answer: yes with the \watch command described nicely by Michael Paquier a while back.

If you are using the psql client packaged with PostgreSQL 9.3 or above, then you can take advantage of the \watch command that was introduced in that version of psql. We'll demonstrate that by doing a batch geocoding exercise with PostGIS tiger geocoder and also revise our example from the prior article to use the more efficient and terser LATERAL construct introduced in PostgreSQL 9.3.

In this exercise, we'll go thru installing PostgreSQL 9.3 on a CentOS 6 64-bit box. We'll cover upgrading in a later article. For the rest of this article, we'll go over configuring yum to use the PostgreSQL PGDG Yum repository found at http://yum.postgresql.org , which has the latest and greatest of 9.3. It's been a while since we wrote step by step instructions for installing with Yum.

This past day, the pgRouting development team released pgRouting 2.0.0 RC1 just steps after PostGIS 2.1.0 rc1. Last week PostGIS project released RC1 of upcoming 2.1.0 PostGIS 2.1.0 RC1.

Now only thing left to make this a 3fer sweetened pot is if strk would move his butt a little faster to get out GEOS 3.4.0.

Also in the news I am now on the GEOS Project Steering Committee and pgRouting development team. Just waiting for my commit keys for GEOS so I can help out with the GEOS release. Yap that's right threaten to help out to speed things up and they make you a development team member or a project steering committee member. I am very proud to be a member of all 3 teams and will do my best to keep all 3 aligned with each other and also PostgreSQL changes. In the past we've stepped on each others toes, e.g making changes in PostGIS 2.0 that broke pgRouting or not testing changes in upcoming PostgreSQL releases and changing accordingly. I hope to keep tabs on these issues and proactively fix them.

For those who wanted a quick tutorial on pgRouting 2.0, I was meaning to write one, but Anita Graser beat me to it. Her pgrouting 2.0 for windows quick guide has a windows flavor, but since pgRouting 2.0 now supports the PostgreSQL extension model, the installation process is much the same regardless what OS you are on if you are running PostgreSQL 9.1+. The rest of the tutorial is QGIS based which is a desktop GIS tool supported on all OS I can think of so definitely worth a read even if you are not on windows.

The PostGIS development team is proud to release a feature complete beta version of upcoming PostGIS 2.1.0. As befits a minor release, the focus is on speed improvements, more features, and bug fixes. While this beta release is feature complete, we expect some bugs and we'd appreciate it if you test it before final release and report back with any issues you run into so we can have a smooth release.

PostgreSQL versions supported in this release are PostgreSQL 9.0-9.3. PostGIS 2.1 is the first minor release to support PostgreSQL 9.3.

If you are currently using PostGIS 2.0+ (compiled with raster support) and PostgreSQL 9.1+, you can go the soft upgrade path:

ALTER EXTENSION postgis UPDATE TO "2.1.0beta3";

Users of 1.5 and below will need to go the hard-upgrade path.

Best served with a bottle of GEOS 3.4.0dev (still in development) and PostgreSQL 9.3beta2 (which will also be released in next week or so).

SOURCE: http://download.osgeo.org/postgis/source/postgis-2.1.0beta3.tar.gz
HTML DOCS: http://download.osgeo.org/postgis/docs/doc-html-2.1.0beta3.tar.gz
PDF DOCS: http://download.osgeo.org/postgis/docs/postgis-2.1.0beta3.pdf
EPUB DOCS: http://download.osgeo.org/postgis/docs/postgis-2.1.0beta3.epub
Key features of upcoming PostGIS 2.1.0 were outlined in our beta2 release http://postgis.net/2013/05/11/postgis-2-1-0beta2

This release contains bug fixes completed since 2.1.0beta2 release

The 3rd MEAP update of PostGIS In Action, 2nd Edition will be going out very shortly to Early Action purchasers. Keep your eyes peeled. Lots of errata corrections in previous chapters and appendix, and one very VERY new chapter on Raster functions which took a ton of time to write, so hopefully it will be well received. Our progress on the chapters is listed on PostGIS In Action 2nd Edition Chapters and all the ones marked as completed you will find in the MEAP. The ones with paperclips have downloadable code and data which you can click on the paperclip to download.

Regarding Raster, the Raster Function chapter is just merely the tip. You'll see a lot more raster usage in upcoming Relating two or more spatial objects and Raster Processing chapter which we are still fleshing out.

We are immensely grateful to all the early action subscribers who have posted errata or general comments about what can be clarified or examples that don't work. General comments about what specific kinds of examples you'd like to see are also welcome. Your opinions really influence what we write and make for a better book.

Today was the last day of the Boston OSGeo code sprint we hosted. Several OSGeo project tribes were represented. PostGIS had a big showing with core PostGIS developers and related working on PostGIS core, PostGIS 3D, PostGIS raster, pgRouting, geocoding, and point clouds. Leo and I with lots of help from Steve Woodbridge, spent a good chunk of time working out kinks of PostGIS pgRouting packaging for Windows and address normalizer replacement for the one packaged with tiger geocoder.

A special shout-out thanks to all the Code Sprint sponsors:

• Gold: EnterpriseDb
• Silver: GeoSynergy, Airborne Interactive
• Bronze: Hobu, Azavea, OneOcean, and AppGeo

More details Paul's PostGIS Summary and Paul's MapServer Summary and our Boston OSGeo Code Sprint Synopsis.

We just finished the first draft of the first 5 chapters of the second edition of PostGIS in Action and is slated to be added to Manning's Early Action Program (MEAP) in the next 2-3 weeks. Some people have asked us about this when they can start purchasing the new edition. The new edition is purchaseable as soon as it hits MEAP phase. With a MEAP purchase you get the E-Book drafts as soon as they are available and if you buy the MEAP with hard-copy option, you also get the final hard-copy when released. MEAP is the same price as the regular book except it can only be bought direct thru Manning and it gives you access to early content so you can see all our mistakes and cross outs as things change.

We shuffled some of the chapters a bit from our earlier table of contents, but in these first 5 chapters you'll be exposed to new features in PostGIS 2.0, the more modern way of creating spatial tables, utilizing the new raster and topology types, and also find out about the new great stuff coming in PostGIS 2.1 that is already available in PostGIS 2.1 pre-release. More on that in the coming weeks.

What is coming in PostGIS 2.1 that you don't want to miss? Lots. Check out our Waiting for PostGIS 2.1 series and also a list of Duncan Golicher's highlights, which Pierre Racine has kindly outlined in Duncan Golicher's series of PostGIS articles

Yap that's right. PostGIS 2.0.0 is finally out the door. It took us Two years and 2 months, a super long incubation for us, but we did it and just in time for Javier's Where 2.0 2.0 Talk.. Paul has some border-line R rated pictures of the birthing process.

We have windows 32 binaries posted for those adventurous enough to taste the cookies while they are hot. We are working on the windows 64-bit binaries. Those should be out tomorrow. We'll be working in the coming week to get the installers ready to put up so they are available via Stack Builder. We'll probably put up the 32-bit ones first, hopefully followed shortly by the 64-bit ones. You should see PostGIS 2.0.0 soon on Yum as well. Devrim is cooking :).