Entries by Leo Hsu and Regina Obe   

Today is April 1st. Having no thoughts on Fools jokes for today, I dug up one of our old April fools, and it was pretty scary how the joke is just about true now. Yes SQL Server now really does run on Linux and is on it's 2017th edition, but still a poor competition to PostgreSQL.

A goody from our old joke archives

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.

We recently installed PostgreSQL 11 on an Ubuntu 18.04 using apt.postgresql.org. Many of our favorite extensions were already available via apt (postgis, ogr_fdw to name a few), but it didn't have the http extension we use a lot. The http extension is pretty handy for querying things like Salesforce and other web api based systems. We'll outline the basic compile and install steps. While it's specific to the http extension, the process is similar for any other extension you may need to compile.

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.

At PGOpen 2018 in San Francisco, we gave a talk on 10 ways to load data into Posgres. This is one of the rare talks where we didn't talk much about PostGIS. However we did showcase tools ogr_fdw, ogr2ogr, shp2pgsql, which are commonly used for loading spatial data, but equally as good for loading non-spatial data. Below are the slide links.

One of the features we are looking forward to in upcoming PostgreSQL 11 is the introduction of procedures via the CREATE PROCEDURE ANSI-SQL construct. The major benefit that sets apart procedures from functions is that procedures are not wrapped in an outer transaction and can have COMMITs within them. This means it's not an all or nothing like it is with functions. Even if you stop a procedure in motion, whatever work has been done and committed is saved. In the case of functions, a stop or failure would roll-back all the work. It also means you can see work in progress of a stored procedure since the work will already have been committed. This is a huge benefit for batch processing. Batch processing covers a lot of use-cases of PostGIS users since a good chunk of PostGIS work involves doing some kind of batch processing of data you get from third-parties or machines.

Most of our use-cases for the built-in json support in PostgreSQL is not to implement schemaless design storage, but instead to remold data. Remolding can take the form of restructuring data into json documents suitable for web maps, javascript charting web apps, or datagrids. It also has uses beyond just outputting data in json form. In addition the functions are useful for unraveling json data into a more meaningful relational form.

One of the common cases we use json support is what we call UNPIVOTING data. We demonstrated this in Postgres Vision 2018 presentation in slide 23. This trick won't work in other relational databases that support JSON because it also uses a long existing feature of PostgreSQL to be able to treat a row as a data field.

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've updated our binaries for PostgreSQL 10 windows, both 32 and 64-bit. The 64-bit should work fine with EnterpriseDb windows as well as BigSQL.

Now that we are in midst of moving our databases and client databases to PostgreSQL 10, we started to build our favorite extensions. One popular one which several have asked when we'll have ready for PostgreSQL 10, is the plv8 extensions.

We now have version 1.4.10 for PostgreSQL 10 windows both the 32-bit and 64-bit. The 64-bit versions will work for PostgreSQL EDB Windows as well as the BigSQL distribution.

Now that we are in midst of moving our databases and client databases to PostgreSQL 10, we started to build our favorite extensions. One popular one which several have asked when we'll have ready for PostgreSQL 10, is the plv8 extensions.

This weekend we spent sometime moving PostGIS/pgRouting windows buildbot Winnie to new hardware. Leo did the hardware and I handled installing and reconfiguring stuff. While I was at it, I upgraded to new Jenkins. Vicky Vergara has been bugging me to setup pgTap so she can run her pgRouting pgTap tests to make sure they work on windows. She's got 22488 tests. She just loves pgTap. Last time I tried installing pgTap I gave up, but I was in mood for experimentation so gave it another chance.

PostgreSQL has a feature called dollar-quoting, which allows you to include a body of text without escaping the single quotes. This feature has existed for quite some time. You've probably seen this in action when defining functions for example:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION hello_world(param_your_name text)
RETURNS text AS
$$
SELECT 'Hello world. My name is ' || param_your_name || '.';
$$
language sql STRICT;

Which is easier to read, than the equivalent escape quoted function:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION hello_world(param_your_name text)
RETURNS text AS
'
SELECT ''Hello world. My name is '' || param_your_name || ''.'';
'
language sql STRICT;

The JSQuery extension is a PostgreSQL extension developed by Postgres Professional. You can get the source code and instructions for use at https://github.com/postgrespro/jsquery. JSQuery is a fairly easy compile install if you are on a Nix system. It provides more query functionality and additional index operator classes to support for JSONB than you get in built in PostgreSQL. It is supported for PostgreSQL 9.4 and above.

We've built windows binaries for PostgreSQL 64-bit 9.4, 9.5, 9.6, and 10beta1. The 9.4 64-bit will only install on the EDB PostgreSQL 9.4 64-bit distribution. The 9.5 and 9.6 are compatible with both PostgreSQL EDB and BigSQL distributions. The 10 has only been tested on BigSQL, but should work on EDB when it comes out. We should have 32-bit versions later and will link to those here.

One of the changes coming in PostgreSQL 10 is the ability for the CASE .. WHEN statement to return multiple rows if the expression contains a set returning function. To demonstrate the feature, we'll use the classic generate_series function: