Open Source GIS
Free and Open Source for Geospatial North America (FOSS4GNA) 2025 was running November 3-5th 2025 and I think it was one of the better FOSS4GNAs we ve had. I was on the programming and workshop committees and we were worried with the government shutdown that things could go badly since we started getting people withdrawing their talks and workshops very close to curtain time. Despite our…
One of the biggest problems open source projects face today is the bus factor problem. I ve been thinking a lot about this lately as how it applies to my PostGIS, pgRouting, and OSGeo System Administration (SAC) teams. Continue reading "The bus factor problem"
PostGIS Day yearly conference sponsored by Crunchy Data is my favorite conference of the year because it s the only conference I get to pig out on PostGIS content and meet fellow passionate PostGIS users pushing the envelop of what is possible with PostGIS and by extension PostgreSQL. Sure FOSS4G conferences do have a lot of PostGIS content, but that content is never quite so front and center as…
PostGIS Day 2023 videos came out recently. PostGIS Day conference is always my favorite conference of the year because you get to see what people are doing all over the world, and it always has many many new tricks for using PostgreSQL and PostGIS family of extensions you had never thought of. Most importantly it s virtual, which makes it much easier for people to fit in their schedules than an on…
Paul Ramsey and I recently had a Fireside chat with Path to Cituscon. Checkout the Podcast Why People care about PostGIS and Postgres . There were a surprising number of funny moments and very insightful stuff. It was a great fireside chat but without the fireplace. We covered the birth and progression of PostGIS for the past 20 years and the trajectory with PostgreSQL. We also learned of Paul s…
I recently released PostGIS 3.3.3. bundle for Windows which is available on application stackbuilder and OSGeo download site for PostgreSQL 11 - 15. If you are running PostgreSQL 12 or above, you get an additional bonus extension MobilityDB which is an extension that leverages PostGIS geometry and geography types and introduces several more spatial-temporal types and functions specifically…
Elizabeth Chistensen already gave a succinct summary of some of the PostGIS Day 2022 presentations, which you can see here . There were many case study presentations which involved use of PostGIS, QGIS, OpenStreetMap, and pgRouting (and other extensions that extend PostGIS) as well as many "How to" videos. There were also talks on "How PostGIS is made". I ll highlight some of these, which overlap…
I didn t think last two years Post GIS Day conferences could be topped, but I was wrong. This year s was absolutely fabulous and better than all the others. We had two key conferences going on this year (yesterday). The first was the Cruncy Data PostGIS Day 2022 12 hour marathon of nothing but PostGIS related talks. Many thanks to Elizabeth Christensen and Paul Ramsey for putting it all together…
PostgreSQL 15 came out just last week. To celebrate the arrival of PostgreSQL 15, I will revisit the number one problem people have with PostGIS, how to upgrade your PostGIS enabled cluster, without installing an old PostGIS version. In a previous article Using pg upgrade to upgrade PostGIS without installing older version I demonstrated a trick for upgrading to a newer PostgreSQL instance from…
This year s PostGIS Day was on November 18, 2021. I celebrated like many others in a PostGIS day virtual conference. You can find the talks and videos at PostGIS Day 2021 . Others celebrated with parties, food, and spirits . This was my favorite PostGIS Day conference ever. Each year just gets better. If I were to sum up this year s conference I would say: A generous helping of code, lots of…
The Free and Open Source for GIS conference : FOSS4G 2021 Buenos Aires Online took place September 27th to October 2nd, 2021 online. Many of the videos from the conference (including mine on PostGIS) are at FOSS4G 2021 Playlist viewable online . Continue reading "FOSS4G 2021 Buenos Aires Videos are out"
One of the new features coming in PostGIS 3.1 is fixed precision support. This new feature will require compilation with not yet released GEOS 3.9. There are a couple of functions already in PostGIS 3.1 that have this new feature -- they are ST_Subdivide, ST_Union, ST_SymDifference, ST_Union, and ST_UnaryUnion as summarized in What s new in PostGIS 3.1 . To take advantage of these new to die for…
The PostGIS Development Team released PostGIS 3.0.0alpha1 recently. There are still more changes to be added, like leveraging more of PostgreSQL 12 enhancements . I ll detail the user facing changes you will see in the 3.0.0alpha1 which impact install and upgrade. I hope these changes will make it easier for users to install and upgrade PostGIS extensions. All these changes were covered in the…
In a previous article Using pg upgrade to upgrade PostGIS without installing older version I demonstrated a trick for upgrading to a newer PostgreSQL instance from PostGIS 2.2 - 2.whatever without having to install the older version of PostGIS in your new PostgreSQL service. Unfortunately that trick does not work if coming from PostGIS 2.1 because in PostGIS 2.2 we renamed a c lib function that…
pgAdmin4 version 3.3 released this week comes with a PostGIS geometry viewer. You will be able to see the graphical output of your query directly in pgAdmin, provided you output a geometry or geography column. If your column is of SRID 4326 (WGS 84 lon/lat), pgAdmin will automatically display against an OpenStreetMap background. We have Xuri Gong to thank for working on this as a PostGIS/pgAdmin…