9.4 - 2   

This christmas I received something very special from Paul Ramsey and Even Roualt as detailed in Foreign Data Wrappers for PostGIS. It's been something I've been patiently waiting for for 4 years. I think it has a few issues I'm working to replicate, but overall it's much faster than I expected and pretty slick.

So why is ogr_fdw so special, because GDAL/OGR is an avenue to many data sources, NOT JUST GEOSPATIAL. It's the NOT JUST that I am most excited about. Though the focus is geospatial you can use it with non-geospatial datasources, as we described a long time ago in OGR2OGR for data loading

Oracle FDW is a foreign data wrapper PostgreSQL extension that allows you to read and write to Oracle database tables from a PostgreSQL database. You can get it via the PGXN network or the main website http://laurenz.github.io/oracle_fdw/.

What is new about the latest 1.1.0 release is that there is now support for the Oracle SDO_GEOMETRY type that allows you to map the most common geometry types POINT, LINE, POLYGON, MULTIPOINT, MULTILINE and MULTIPOLYGON to PostGIS geometry type. Much of the spatial plumbing work was done by Vincent Mora of Oslandia. If we have any Windows Oracle users out there, yes there are binaries available for windows for PostgreSQL 9.1- 9.4 for both 32-bit and 64-bit. The FDW does have a dependency on the OCI.dll which I think comes shipped with Oracle products. Unfortunately, we are not Oracle users so can't kick the tires.

Yesterday was PostGIS day or as some may call it, Post GIS day and a couple of interesting things happened this day:

• PostgreSQL 9.4 RC1 came out.
• There were parties and unconferences, many summarized on http://2014.postgisday.rocks
• I managed to entertain myself with a Conway's game of life PostGIS raster Map algebra style and pondered how wonderful PostGIS would be if it could generate animated gifs with some sort of aggregate function; to which I was politely called crazy by some of my fellow PSC friends.

But what was greatest of all and took the cake were these pictures:

A while back, we discussed using pgAdmin pgScript as a quicky way for running a repetitive update script where you want each loop to commit right away. Since stored functions have to commit as a whole, you can't use stored functions alone for this kind of processing.

If you are using the psql client packaged with PostgreSQL 9.3 or above, then you can take advantage of the \watch command that was introduced in that version of psql. We'll demonstrate that by doing a batch geocoding exercise with PostGIS tiger geocoder and also revise our example from the prior article to use the more efficient and terser LATERAL construct introduced in PostgreSQL 9.3.

PostgreSQL 9.4beta1 was released last week and windows binaries for both 32-bit and 64-bit are already available to try it out from http://www.postgresql.org/download/windows. Since this is a beta release, there are no installers yet, just the zip binary archive. To make the pot a little sweeter, we've setup the PostGIS windows build bot (Winnie) to automatically build for 9.4 - PostGIS 2.2.0 development branch and pgRouting 2 branches whenever there is a change in the code. We also have the pointcloud extension in the extras folder. If you are on 9.3, we've got 2.2 binaries for that as well. The PostGIS/pgRouting related stuff you can find at http://postgis.net/windows_downloads in the 9.4 folder.

For the rest of this article we'll discuss a couple of stumbling blocks you may run into.

Much of what we'll describe here is windows specific, but thanks to the beauty of extensions and GUCs, the extension install and GUC setting part for PostGIS is applicable to all operating systems.