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A while ago when Foreign Data Wrappers in PostgreSQL was a fairly new thing, we talked about the ODBC_FDW foreign data wrapper. Since then, people have been asking us how to get the ODBC FDW to work on newer PostgreSQL. Sadly the ODBC_FDW was stuck in time not having updated to newer FDW API standards. Our recommendation was just to use OGR_FDW, which many distributions both Linux and Windows have compiled OGR_FDW with ODBC support. True that OGR_FDW is coined as a spatial data wrapper, but the reality is spatial data rarely lives apart from regular attribute data so a good spatial vector driver supports both vector data and bread and butter data types. OGR_FDW is still our go to for working with spreadsheets and folders of CSV files.

Recently the fine folks at Carto patched the ODBC FDW to work with PostgreSQL 9.5. I do hope they accept my modest patch to make it work with PostgreSQL 9.6 as well. So now 2 FDWs to choose from for connecting to ODBC datasources. Which one is better? The answer as most always is IT DEPENDS.

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.

Someone reported recently on PostGIS mailing list, that they were unable to install PostGIS 2.2.1 bundle or PostGIS 2.2.2 binaries on a clean PostgreSQL 9.5.2 install. Someone also complained about PostgreSQL 9.3 (though not clear the version) if that is a separate issue or the same. I have tested on PostgreSQL 9.5.2 Windows 64-bit and confirmed the issue. The issue does not affect PostgreSQL 9.5.1 and older. I haven't confirmed its an issue with the 32-bit installs, but I suspect so too. This issue will affect OGR_FDW users and people who used our compiled WWW_FDW.

FDW binaries for PostgreSQL 9.5 windows 64-bit/32-bit

As you may have noticed we've been building our favorite extensions which we'll use in our PostgreSQL 9.5 installs. Next on our list are the FDWS

Below are the zip files that contain the binaries and dependency files for our favorite FDWs (that aren't normally available for windows)

These packages contain www_fdw and file_textarray_fdw

I've built pl/v8 for PostgreSQL 9.5 both 32-bit and 64-bit.

I built basically using these instructions on my gist gist page.

PostgreSQL 9.4 and below doesn't support importing whole set of tables from a FOREIGN server, but PostgreSQL 9.5 does with the upcoming Import Foreign Schema. To use will require FDW wrapper designers to be aware of this feature and use the plumbing in their wrappers. IMPORT FOREIGN SCHEMA for ogr_fdw come PostgreSQL 9.5 release is on the features ticket list.

The ogr_fdw comes with this to die for commandline utility called ogr_fdw_info that does generate the table structures for you and will also list all the tables in the Foreign data source if you don't give it a specific table name. So with this utility I wrote a little hack involving using PostgreSQL COPY PROGRAM feature to call out to the ogr_fdw_info commandline tool to figure out the table names and some DO magic to create the tables.

Though ogr_fdw is designed to be a spatial foreign data wrapper, it's turning out to be a pretty nice non-spatial FDW as well especially for reading spreadsheets which we seem to get a lot of. This hack I am about to demonstrate I am demonstrating with LibreOffice/OpenOffice workbook, but works equally well with Excel workbooks and most any data source that OGR supports.

PostgreSQL 9.5RC1 got released recently, and as with PostgreSQL 9.5beta2, the FDW API changed just enough so that the ogr_fdw I compiled for PostgreSQL 9.5beta2 no longer worked for PostgreSQL 9.5RC1. While patching up ogr_fdw to make it work with PostgreSQL 9.5RC1, I took a study of postgres_fdw to see how much effort it would be to implement this new PostgreSQL 9.5 Import Schema functionality for my favorite fdw ogr_fdw. Took me about a day's work, and if I was more experienced, it would have been probably only an hour to graft the logic from postgres_fdw and the ogr_fdw_info that Paul Ramsey had already done, to achieve Import Foreign Schema nirvana. Here's hoping my ogr_fdw patch gets accepted in some shape or form in time for PostgreSQL 9.5 release and in time to package for Windows PostGIS 2.2 Bundle for PostgreSQL 9.5.

We just pushed out installers for PostGIS 2.2.0 for PostgreSQL 9.5beta2 windows both 32-bit and 64-bit on Application Stackbuilder. These installers are also available as standalone listed on PostGIS windows page. This is the first PostGIS 2.2.0 release for the PostgreSQL 9.5 32-bit and a rerelease for PostgreSQL 9.5 x 64-bit (this time compiled against beta2 instead of beta1).

On quick testing the PostGIS 2.2 beta1 release and pgRouting 2.1.0 worked fine on 9.5beta2, however you may want to reinstall anyway just to be safe. You can just reinstall over your existing install, no need to uninstall first. Similarly just upgrading a PostgreSQL 9.5beta1 to 9.5beta2 seemed to not require pg_upgrade or dump/restore, so safe to just upgrade from 9.5beta1 to 9.5beta2. Other notes about this 9.5beta2 PostGIS 2.2.0 release:

• The FDW API changed between PostgreSQL 9.5beta1 and PostgreSQL 9.5beta2, so the OGR_FDW, if you don't reinstall the bundle, will crash and burn in PostgreSQL 9.5beta2 (using PostGIS 2.2. beta1 executables). Similarly this newly compiled OGR_FDW will not work on PostgreSQL 9.5beta1 (so upgrade to 9.5beta2 first).
• The PostgreSQL 9.5betas (that includes both beta1 and beta2), are compiled against the pointcloud 1.1 master branch. This was required because the released pointcloud 1.0.1, does not compile against PostgreSQL 9.5
• The PostgreSQL 9.5beta2 PostGIS 2.2.0 release comes packaged with SFCGAL 1.2.2 (instead of 1.2.0 like the others versions) which fixes a crasher with ST_StraightSkeleton as noted in ticket - https://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/3324. Newer SFCGAL will be packaged with upcoming PostGIS 2.2.1, but if you are on an older edition and are using SFCGAL, you can always copy latest SFCGAL.dll binaries from the 2.2.1dev packages on PostGIS windows page http://postgis.net/windows_downloads/.

There are two PostgreSQL FDWs (currently maintained) I know of for connecting to SQL Server from a Linux/Unix PostgreSQL box. There is the TDS Foreign Data wrapper (tds_fdw driver) which relies on the Free TDS driver. This is a fairly light-weight FDW since it just relies on TDS which is commonly already available on Linux installs or an easy install away. Unfortunately when I tried to use it on windows (compiling my usual mingw64 way), while it compiled and installed, it crashed when I attempted to connect to my SQL Server 2008 R2 box table, so I gave up on it for the time being as a cross-platform solution. One thing I will say about it is that it accepts ad-hoc queries from what I can see, as a data source, which is pretty nice. So we may revisit it in the future to see if we can get it to work on windows. I'm not sure if tds_fdw would support SQL Server spatial geometry columns though would be interesting to try.

The second option, which as you may have noticed, we spent much time talking about is the ogr_fdw foreign data driver. ogr_fdw utilizes UnixODBC on Linux, iODBC on MacOSX and Windows ODBC on windows for connecting to SQL Server. The ogr_fdw big downside is that it has a dependency on GDAL, which is a hefty FOSS swiss-army knife ETL tool that is a staple of all sorts of spatial folks doing both open source and proprietary development. The good thing about ogr_fdw, is that since it is a spatial driver, it knows how to translate SQL Server geometry to it's equivalent PostGIS form in addition to being able to handle most of the other not-so spatial columns.

After installing PostgreSQL 9.4 and PostGIS following An Almost Idiot's guide to installing PostgreSQL, PostGIS, and pgRouting, on my CentOS 6.7 64-bit except replacing 9.3 references with equivalent 9.4 reference, I then proceeded to install ogr_fdw. To my disappointment, there are no binaries yet for that, which is not surprising, considering there aren't generally any binaries for any OS, except the windows ones I built which I will be packaging with PostGIS 2.2 windows bundle. Getting out of my windows comfort zone, I proceeded to build those on CentOS. Mainly because I have a client on CentOS where ogr_fdw I think is a perfect fit for his workflow and wanted to see how difficult of a feat this would be. I'll go over the steps I used for building and stumbling blocks I ran into in this article with hope it will be of benefit to those who find themselves in a similar situation.

pgRouting 2.1 Beta release is out. Full details at https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/pgrouting-dev/2015-August/001569.html. pgRouting 2.1 works with PostGIS 2.1 and 2.2.0dev.

PostGIS 2.2 is planned to reach feature freeze June 30th 2015 so we can make the September PostgreSQL 9.5 curtain call with confidence. Great KNN enhancements for PostgreSQL 9.5 only users. I've been busy getting all my ducks lined up. A lot on tiger geocoder and address standardizer extension to be shipped with windows builds, story for later. One other feature we plan to ship with the windows PostGIS 2.2 builds is the ogr_fdw ogr_fdw Foreign data wrapper extension. I've been nagging Paul Ramsey a lot about issues with it, this in particular https://github.com/pramsey/pgsql-ogr-fdw/issues/25, and after some prodding, he finally put his nose in and fixed them and pinged Even Rouault for some help on a GDAL specific item.

Needless to say, I've been super happy with the progress and support I've gotten with ogr_fdw development and really enjoying my ogr_fdw use. The XLSX reading a file saved after the connection was open required a fix in GDAL 2.0 branch (which missed GDAL 2.0.0 release, so because of this, this new package contains a GDAL 2.0.1ish library. Hopeful GDAL 2.0.1 will be out before PostGIS 2.2.0 comes out so I can release without guilt with this fix.

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.

If you have the OGR_FDW we discussed in OGR FDW Windows first taste built with ODBC support, then you can access most any ODBC datasource from PostgreSQL. This is especially useful for Windows users. Two of the data sources I've been experimenting with are SQL Server and MS Access. In this article, I'll demonstrate how to connect to MS Access with PostgreSQL running on a windows box. I think there is an Access driver for Unix/Linux most robust utilizes java. I won't go there.

One of the foreign data wrappers I included in the PostgreSQL 9.3 Windows FDW bag and PostgreSQL 9.4 Windows FDW bag is the www_fdw extension used for querying web services. Someone asked that since I didn't build curl with SSL support, they are unable to use it with https connections. The main reason I didn't is that the EDB installs come with ssleay32.dll and libeay32.dll (even the 64-bit) which are dependencies of curl when built with SSL support. I wanted to minimize the issue of distributing dlls that are packaged with Windows PostgreSQL installers already.

Though this article is specific to using www_fdw on Windows systems, many of the issues are equally applicable to other platforms, so may be worth a read if you are running into similar issues with using specialty SSL certificates on Linux/Unix/Mac.