Postgres OnLine Journal   

We'll be hosting the September 10th, 2013 PostgreSQL User Group meetup at Devonshire Sky Club (in the center of Boston Financial district and block away from city hall). This is the same venue we hosted the Boston OSGeo Code Sprint except this time we'll have some EnterpriseDb folks joining us. Sign-up while supplies last. Leo's got a nice cocktail and food lineup.

We'll be giving an introductory talk about PostGIS and also give a brief overview of what's packed in the PostGIS 2.1 release that is currently in beta, and that should be out by meetup time. Remember this is the first version of PostGIS to support upcoming PostgreSQL 9.3.

Not only will we have cocktails, but we'll also be giving out PostgreSQL/PostGIS door prizes.

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

I've been having issues with PostgreSQL error handling mostly on windows 64-bit using binaries I build with mingw64 and using under VC++ built PostgreSQL. Most of which I don't understand. As many have pointed out these issues MIGHT go away or be easier to debug if PostGIS was built with same tool chain as EDB VC++ distributions. I can't argue with that especially since its never been done.

The good news is changing my build chain from mingw64 GCC 4.5.4 to mingw64 GCC 4.8.0 has eradicated all of these issues, and even ones I had with PL/V8 that happended both in a pure mingw64(w32/w64) as well as PostgreSQL VCC (32/64 bit) environment. It did introduce this minor annoying nat, presumably because my libpq.dll now has a dependency on user32.dll (which just seems wrong). The other nat is that all the binaries I built that have c++ in them (depend on libstd++) now need to be recompiled which means my prior builds of PostGIS will not be compatible with my upcoming 4.8.0 ones. A real pain since for PostGIS/pgRouting I've got like at least 15 of those dependencies and growing. So I've decided to perform this exercise just for PostgreSQL 9.3 -- a new beginning at PostGIS 2.1 and see how it goes before I bother with 9.2, 9.1. These issues really only affect PostgreSQL 64-bit PostGIS users and as a 64-bit user, you may never have even come across them.