BostonGIS - pgrouting

The bus factor problem

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 22:11:00 -0500

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.

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Why People care about PostGIS and Postgres and FOSS4GNA

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 23:22:00 -0400

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 plans to revolutionize PostGIS which was new to me. We covered many other side-line topics, like QGIS whose birth was inspired by PostGIS. We covered pgRouting and mobilitydb which are two other PostgreSQL extension projects that extend PostGIS.

We also managed to fall into the Large Language Model conversation of which Paul and I are on different sides of the fence on.

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PostGIS Day 2022 Videos are out and some more highlights

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 16:27:00 -0500

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 with Elizabeth's list but different angle of view.

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PostGIS Day 2021 Highlights

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sat, 18 Dec 2021 17:04:00 -0500

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 humor, and lots of people. Thanks Elizabeth Christensen, Paul Ramsey and Crunchy Data for putting this conference together. All talks were really good so hard to isolate just a couple.

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Code Sprint in Boston after FOSS4G 2017

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 17:22:00 -0400

Reminder: Right after the Free and Open Source GIS conference in Boston is the OSGeo / LocationTech code sprint on Saturday August 19th 9AM-5PM at District Hall where project members from various Open Source Geospatial projects will be fleshing out ideas, documenting, coding, and introducing new folks to open source development. All are welcome including those who are unable to make the conference.

We are getting a final head-count this week to plan for food arrangements. If you are planning to attend, add your name to the list https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2017_Code_Sprint#Registered_Attendees. If you are unable to add your name to the list, feel free to send Regina an email at lr@pcorp.us with your name and projects you are interested in so I can add you to the list. Looking forward to hanging out with folks interested in PostgreSQL and PostGIS development.

District Hall is a gorgeous community space. Check out the District Hall View http://bit.ly/2f61J8c

Using OSGeoLive with VirtualBox

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 03:55:00 -0400

FOSS4G 2017 is just a few weeks away. Many of the workshops will utilize OSGeoLive as a means for workshop participants to get up and running quickly with OSGeo Free and Open Source GIS tools and Boston data. OSGeoLive11 is a LUbuntu 16.04 distribution. OSGeoLive11 is going thru the final stages of prep. You can download the OSGeoLiveRC1 ISO for it from http://aiolos.survey.ntua.gr/gisvm/11.0/osgeo-live-11.0rc1-amd64.iso.

Once OSGeoLive11 is fully prepped, it will be linked on the osgeolive site http://live.osgeo.org. If you want to run OSGeoLive11 from bootable media, you can burn the ISO to DVD or thumb drive and boot. In final prep, you can expect to have a Virtual Image ready to go you can host on Virtual Box or VMWare and make further customizations. OSGeoLive11 thumb drives will be handed out at the conference.

If you are doing any PostgreSQL/ PostGIS / pgRouting / or other GIS training, OSGeoLive is pretty handy. OSGeoLive11 contains PostgreSQL 9.5 (I know slightly dated) , PostGIS 2.3.2 and cli tools, pgRouting 2.4.1, and osm2pgrouting 2.2.0. In addition it contains popular GIS Desktop friends QGIS, OpenJump, gvSig, uDig as well as power tools like GRASS, R, GDAL CLI toolkit, and Jupyter notebooks. Mapping Servers MapServer and GeoServer. We'll be using pgRouting, osm2pgRouting, PostGIS, PostgreSQL, QGIS, and OpenJump in our workshop Problem Solving with pgRouting. A good chunk of FOSS GIS relies on PostgreSQL via PostGIS so you'll find a lot of already setup PostgreSQL databases on this disk.

For this set of exercises, we're going to go thru using the ISO media linked above on a Windows 7 VirtualBox setup. If you are using any other OS (e.g. Mac OSX, Linux, Unix), instructions should be much the same.

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Slides from PGConfUS 2017 PostGIS talk

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 03:23:00 -0400

At PGConfUS 2017 last week, we presented a talk: Top 10 Problems Solved by PostGIS. The slides for the talk in HTML format and PDF format. The pgRouting examples at the end of the talk seemed to be the most popular.

We'll be giving a pgRouting workshop at FOSS4G Boston 2017 Aug 14-19th where we'll go into much more depth about topics like drive time analysis and Vehicle Route schedule planning (VRP). We also hope to give a talk at FOSS4G 2017 on PostGIS spatial tricks.

PGConfUS 2017 Getting Stuff done in PostGIS

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sun, 26 Mar 2017 00:42:06 -0400

A reminder, PGConfUS 2017 conference is just days away, and we'll be giving a training March 28th 2017, Jersey City, NJ at 1 PM. If you are coming, keep an eye on this page PGConf 2017 US Getting Stuff done with PostGIS materials.

If you haven't signed up already, there are still spots, make sure to buy your tickets at http://pgconf.us/conferences/2017#registration.

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FOSS4GNA 2016: pgRouting - A Crash course video is out

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sat, 04 Jun 2016 03:05:00 -0400

Leo's pgRouting : a Crash Course video made it thru great. Better than mine. Leo doesn't believe in slides, so this is all live demo stuff. The data he used in the video is part of our code/data download for pgRouting: A Practical Guide.

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pgRouting 2.2.3 released with support for PostgreSQL 9.6beta1

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:00 -0400

pgRouting 2.2.3 was released last week. Main change is this version now supports PostgreSQL 9.6. Many thanks to Vicky Vergara for working thru the issues with PostgreSQL 9.6 and getting it to work. Vicky has also been doing a good chunk of the coding (a lot of Boost refactoring and integrating more Boost features), testing, and documentation in pgRouting, osm2pgrouting, and QGIS pgRoutingLayer in general for pgRouting 2.1, 2.2, and upcoming 2.3. We are very indebted to her for her hard work.

If you are a windows user testing the waters of PostgreSQL 9.6beta1, we have pgRouting 2.2.3 binaries and PostGIS 2.3.0dev binaries at http://postgis.net/windows_downloads.

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FOSS4G NA 2016 Early Bird ending soon and come see us

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 15:26:00 -0400

The FOSS4G NA 2016 in North Carolina early bird registration running May 2nd-5th (May 2nd is workshop day) will be ending this month. This means after this month, ticket prices will go up by as much as $200 depending on what kind of pass you need. If you are a speaker you should register now so we have a good head-count. Hotel prices will go up after this coming week too since conference room block will expire so all the more reason to register now.

On a related note, both Leo and I will be giving talks.

PostGIS Spatial Tricks, will also cover some neat-highlights coming in PostGIS 2.3

pgRouting: A crash course focused on pgRouting 2.1-2.2

There will be other PostGIS talks and PostgreSQL day (May 3rd) talks for PostGIS and PostgreSQL users.

pgRouting: A PRACTICAL GUIDE now on sale

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 10:55:00 -0500

Our upcoming book pgRouting: A PRACTICAL GUIDE (publisher LocatePress) just went on sale a couple of days ago. We currently have a little over 100 pages of content. We expect the final published book to weight in at a little over 250 pages.

pgRouting is a PostgreSQL extension that also utilizes PostGIS for solving routing problems. Routing problems involve application of costs to network paths as well as considerations of the parties involved such as kinds vehicles, people, packages etc. that will be carried across these networks. While routing is often applied to physical networks like roads and bike paths, the fundamentals of routing go beyond the physical. Spatial concepts such as edges and nodes are a convenient way of visualizing costs across even a logical network.

If you purchase now, you'll get the following benefits:

Significant discount off the eBook final price. Currently 50% off
Our current preview draft and updates to the draft as we update it
Input via our discussion page of what you'd like to see covered. That could be specific functions or kinds of examples or just some clarity.

The focus of this book is pgRouting 2.1+. It's really hard to talk about pgRouting without giving some air time to PostGIS and PostgreSQL, which are some of the key foundations of pgRouting. As such expect to see a lot of talk of PostGIS and PostgreSQL in this book. Since pgRouting 2.0 is so different from pgRouting 2.1, we had to make a difficult decision to focus on the future rather than the past. The appendix does cover some content of how things were done in pgRouting 2.0 and how they changed in pgRouting 2.1+. You can expect the appendix discussion to be expanded. For the core of the book we've largely abandonned any mention of pgRouting 2.0 though pgRouting 2.1 is for the most part backward compatible with pgRouting 2.0 if you choose to be limited by the pgRouting 2.0 function signatures.

We've been pushing package maintainers to focus on releasing pgRouting 2.1 rather than sticking with pgRouting 2.0 and also encouraging maintainers who haven't carried pgRouting before, to start doing so. The PostGIS 2.2 windows bundle comes packaged with pgRouting 2.1 for example. Yes these are selfish reasons, but FOSS is inherently a selfish scratch your own itch kind of pursuit, and that's a good thing since all our common self-interests come together to make something very special that will change the world.

We are planning for the book to be released in another 3-4 months. I know we had planned to release around now, but as happens with every book we've written so far, as we get deeper into it, we realize, keeping it baking just a little longer is so much better than rushing thru the process and outputting a half-baked pie. Although pgRouting 2.2 is still being heavily worked on, the development version is almost feature complete and slated for release in next three to four months. As such we plan to cover some new features coming in pgRouting 2.2 and hope pgRouting 2.2 is out just before or around the same time as this book.

PostGIS 2.2.0 windows bundle is now on Application Stackbuilder includes pgRouting 2.1.0

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 22:37:00 -0400

The PostGIS 2.2.0 bundles for windows for PostgreSQL 9.3-9.4 (both 32/64-bit) and PostgreSQL 9.5beta1 64-bit are now on stackbuilder. I'm working out some compile issues for the PostgreSQL 9.5beta1 32-bit so don't have those ready yet. This includes pgRouting 2.1.0 and inaugural release of PostGIS SFCGAL extension, OGR FDW spatial foreign data wrapper, and pgPointCloud on windows.

I have also updated our popular BostonGIS - Part 1: Getting Started With PostGIS: An almost Idiot's Guide to utilize PostgreSQL 9.5beta1 and PostGIS 2.2. Still on our todo is to update the loader/query example and also the pgRouting tutorial for pgRouting 2.1.0. A ton has changed in pgRouting 2.1.0, so be sure to buy our book pgRouting: A Practical Guide which will have a preview release sale coming soon with first 4-5 draft chapters available and all on final publication all chapters (approximately 10-12).

Check out the PostGIS Bundle 2.2 extensions higlighted in yellow in pgAdmin extensions drop down

To take full advantage of what PostGIS 2.2 has to offer (notable true KNN distance for geometry, geography, and 3D geometries -- not just bounding box like is available for PostgreSQL 9.4 and below), you need to use PostgreSQL 9.5. So start testing out your apps on PostgreSQL 9.5 now so you will be ready when it hits release.

PostGIS and extended SFCGAL and pgRouting family spotted in Seoul

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 09:50:00 -0400

I missed Seoul, but I spotted these familiar looking family faces in Jody Garnett's picture deck.

Ko Nagase and Vicky Vergara: pgRouting from KYUHO SHIM's photos

Hiroaki Sengoku and Vicky Vergara: pgRouting

Vicky Vergara and Vincent Picavet: pgRouting and SFCGAL

Olivier Courtin: PostGIS and SFCGAL

Daniel Kastl: pgRouting

And last but not least - the Lone Ranger

Paul Ramsey: PostGIS

pgRouting 2.1.0 and osm2pgrouting-2.1.0-alpha is out, windows binaries available

nospam@example.com (Regina Obe) — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 22:26:00 -0400

pgRouting 2.1.0 got released today along with pgRouting 2.0.1 and osm2pgrouting 2.1.0-alpha1. Full details on Daniel's note: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/pgrouting-users/2015-September/002148.html.

I want to especially thank Vicky Vergara for putting in all the long hours to make this happen. I am most excited about the changes in osm2pgrouting -- now support of bigints, speed improvement, and mutli-file loading much of which is Vicky and GSoc work. As a small contribution, I added schema support for osm2pgrouting 2.1

I also want to extend a BIG thank you to Ko Nagase for fixing a TRSP bug that only exhibited on 64-bit windows (fixed in pgRouting 2.0.1 and pgRotuing 2.1.0) as well as his fixing of other windows and boost related compile issues.

For windows users excited to try all these new features, you can get them - on PostGIS windows download page (for PostgreSQL 9.2-9.4) : http://postgis.net/windows_downloads

We plan to package osm2pgrouting 2.1.0 (latest) and pgRouting 2.1.0 as part of the upcoming PostGIS 2.2 Windows Application builder bundle install for PostgreSQL 9.3-9.5. We would very much appreciate people testing these packages out now so no surprises come official package time.

If you already have pgRouting 2.0.0 installed in your database, you can upgrade with :

ALTER EXTENSION pgrouting UPDATE TO "2.1.0";

If you were experimenting with a beta or RC pgrouting, you'll need to drop the extension and readd

DROP EXTENSION pgrouting;
CREATE EXTENSION pgrouting VERSION "2.1.0";

To confirm you are running the latest and greatest, run this query:

SELECT * 
FROM pgr_version();

Which should output:

 version |       tag       | build |  hash   | branch | boost
---------+-----------------+-------+---------+--------+--------
 2.1.0   | pgrouting-2.1.0 | 1     | b38118a | master | 1.59.0
(1 row)