Postgres OnLine Journal   

PostGIS 2.1.1 maintenance release was released just yesterday. Details are on the PostGIS.net site: PostGIS 2.1.1 release notes.

For windows users, we have binaries available for PostgreSQL 9.0-9.3 (64-bit) and 9.2-9.3 (32-bit). Which are available in the winnie bot section of download page. We plan to have the windows installers available for 9.2 and 9.3 (both 32 and 64-bit) in the next week or so.

Alexander Kuznetsov on SQLblog.com has an interesting series going entitled with Learning PostgreSQL. In the series he focuses on what it takes to move a SQL Server database and App to PostgreSQL and highlights some of the key differences between the two platforms that you should watch out for. I recommend it to any SQL Server developer planning to make the switch to PostgreSQL or any PostgreSQL consultant tasked with the job and not familiar with the intricacies of SQL Server.

His PostgreSQL feed can be found here here

So far on his list of articles in the series:

In PostgreSQL 9.3 Postgres_FDW: A Test Drive we talked about taking Postgres Foreign Data Wrapper for a test drive. One downside of the Postgres FDW and actually most PostgreSQL FDWs is that the foreign table structure can't be inspected from the source and the fields have to be explicitly stated in the foreign table definition. If you have a lot of tables to script, this can quickly become tedious. For our planned used cases, we plan to script Foreign tables from a source database for tables that are bulky and rarely change and then build materialized views against those for faster performance where needed. To help in this end, we wrote a quick SQL function that you install on the source database and when run will generate foreign table creation statements to install on a target database.

One thing that was important to us was that the function properly handle views and typmod types since PostGIS now uses typmod heavily and many of our databases have spatial data and complex views we'd like to link in as foreign tables.