editor note - 1   

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

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.

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.

Leo and I attended the Paris OSGeo Code Sprint at Mozilla Foundation put together by Oslandia and funded by several companies. It was a great event. There was quite a bit of PostGIS related hacking that happened by many new faces. We have detailed at BostonGIS: OSGeo Code Sprint 2016 highlights some of the more specific PostGIS hacking highlights. Giuseppe Broccolo of 2nd Quadrant already mentioned BRIN for PostGIS: my story at the Code Sprint 2016 in Paris.

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.

If you weren't able to make it to FOSS4G 2014 this year, you can still experience the event Live. All the tracks are being televised live and its pretty good reception. https://2014.foss4g.org/live/. Lots of GIS users using PostGIS and PostgreSQL. People seem to love Node.JS too.

After hearing enough about Node.JS from all these people, and this guy (Bill Dollins), I decided to try this out for myself.

I created a node.js web application - which you can download from here: https://github.com/robe2/node_postgis_express . It's really a spin-off from my other viewers, but more raw. I borrowed the same ideas as Bill, but instead of having a native node Postgres driver, I went for the pure javascript one so its easier to install on all platforms. I also experimented with using base-64 encoding to embed raster output directly into the browser so I don't have to have that silly img src path reference thing to contend with.

For those of you who will be attending either of our PostGIS sessions in Postgres Open 2014 in Chicago September 17th, we've put up a page where we'll be posting links to the data we'll be using as well as the examples so you can follow along and copy and paste. Page is http://www.postgis.us/pgopen2014.

We ask that you bookmark the page before you come and try to install PostGIS 2.1 if you haven't already. Not much to see there yet. For those who haven't signed up, it's not too late. For those who will be unable to make it, we'll try to post all the content from the tutorials on the above page.

This is partly in response to Josh's blog entry Calling Bullsh*t in Open Source communities and Sarah Sharp's plea for No more verbal abuse. I think Linus Torvalds is being treated unfairly and is being abused for his frank, no bullsh*t, flowery quiky style of stating it. Many have accepted the axiom that Linus is a jerk, childish and needs to conform to the professional standard simply because we are too lazy to analyze the facts for ourselves and like many public figures Linus likes to give people a good show.

Quotes from Linus

She simply doesn't agree with Linus brand of Tough love which is a brand that I share -- perhaps because I'm in the same age group as Linus.

So my plea is, please let us not get into the business of training people on the ART OF NICENESS and SENSITIVITY and studying the loop holes so that we can use that as a weapon to stab each other behind closed doors and private emails where NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU CRYING FOR HELP.

I think I am more qualified than most to judge verbal abuse and oppression when I see it. I'm the daughter of a black Nigerian man and a white American mother. I was born in Nigeria and spent my youth there. I've been traumatized all my life both verbally and physically from all sides for being different in all kinds of ways. This trauma is most often inflicted by women who've told me to be quiet because I do not have the social skills to grasp what is happening. My lesson learned is your oppressor may be someone that looks just like you (or thinks he/she understands what you are feeling) and your ally just MAY BE a purple dragon living in a cave wearing a bathrobe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Forget Linux, Forget Unix, Forget MacWhatever, forget Windows, and any other OS you may be using. Say hello to PostOS. PostOS is built on PostgreSQL technology and fits you like a glove.

The built-in planner watches you type (or stare in confusion) and creates a composite image of what kind of person you are and what behavior it should emulate. It's integrated monitor display and speakers are used to provide information as well as to watch and hear your every move. The built-in image recognition system (an extension to the PostGIS extension), can distinguish between members of your family and can impersonate them as well and change behavior accordingly.

We have all the setup executables for PostgreSQL 8.4-9.2 32-bit and PostgreSQL 9.1-9.2 x64-bit for PostGIS 2.0.3. We'll have the 9.0x64-bit ones up shortly but do have the binaries.

We are planning to release these to stackbuilder sometime next week, but would like some feedback first with any issues people run into.

One person already reported a serious bug in our original packaging which we fixed. If you already installed 2.0.3 the x64-bit version or any of the 9.2 versions (both x32 and x64) that was not marked as -2.zip, -2.exe, you'll want to reinstall. The 8.4-9.1 32-bits were not affected so just have a -1.

Packages can be downloaded from:
http://download.osgeo.org/postgis/windows

General details on what is included:

As always if you are installing for PostgreSQL x64 make sure to pick a zip or installer with 64 in the name. The unmarked or marked with 32 are just for PostgreSQL 32-bit.

Just a heads up, the Second Edition of PostGIS In Action has officially reached MEAP stage meaning you can buy now and get draft chapters as we write them and get final copy when released. Have first drafts of 5 chapters so far. And many more coming shortly.

It is currently the Manning Deal of the Day

January 22, 2013
PostGIS in Action
Second Edition
Get half off the MEAP eBook
or MEAP pBook
Enter pgislaunchau in the Promotional Code box when you check out.
http://www.manning.com/obe2 With purchase you also get the E-Book copy of the first edition.