Howard Hughes Medical Institute

2018/11/03  in casestudy ( bioinformatics, neuroscience, research, us )

As a software engineer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, I work on a collaborative neuron reconstruction and analysis software called CATMAID 1 (screenshot: 3), which is used for neuroscience research. We use PostGIS to represent neurons in a 3D space.

They consist of 3D points that reference their parent nodes or are the root [=soma of neuron] if they have no parent). Together with synapses, point clouds and TIN meshes for modeling compartments in a dataset, they model the spatial aspects of our neuroscience world. Users create those neuron reconstructions manually in a collaborative fashion plus segmentation programs can be used as additional data source. Using its spatial indices, PostGIS helps us to quickly query neurons in a particular field of view. The space of a single project contains sometimes 100s of millions of interconnected individual points. We also do bounding box intersection queries between neurons and compartment meshes, which then refine in the front-end by doing more precise intersection tests.

This software is used by quite a few research labs and as far as I know they all do their own hosting with a dedicated server and this is what we do as well. The reason being mainly that wth larger datasets, we benefit from machines with a lot of RAM (>256G), fast SSD/NVMe drives and many CPUs as well as fast local data access for e.g. image data.

Thanks so much for making PostGIS work well in non-GIS contexts too—-it makes my life much easier!

Vanguard Appraisals

2018/11/02  in casestudy ( property appraisal, us )

Vanguard Appraisals is new to the GIS world. In fact, we aren’t really in the GIS world; we just kind of brush up against it. We do mass property appraisal for entire county and city jurisdictions, and we develop software to collect, price and maintain values. We also host assessment data online so that homeowners can search and find property information much simpler from the comfort of their own home. Our software and websites are used in 7 states (IA, IL, MN, MO, NE, ND, SD).

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PostGIS 2.5.0

2018/09/23  in news ( release, 2.5, 2.5.0 )

The PostGIS development team is pleased to release PostGIS 2.5.0.

Although this release will work for PostgreSQL 9.4 and above, to take full advantage of what PostGIS 2.5 offers, you should be running PostgreSQL 11beta4+ and GEOS 3.7.0 which were released recently.

Best served with PostgreSQL 11 beta4 and pgRouting 2.6.1.

WARNING: If compiling with PostgreSQL+JIT, LLVM >= 6 is required Supported PostgreSQL versions for this release are: PostgreSQL 9.4 - PostgreSQL 12 (in development) GEOS >= 3.5

2.5.0

• source download
• NEWS
• PDF docs en, de
• html doc download
• html online en, de, ko_KR, ja
• epub doc download
• pgsql help files for non-english languages: de, ja,kr, br, es
• Changelog

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PostGIS 2.5.0rc2

2018/09/16  in news ( release, 2.5, 2.5.0rc2 )

The PostGIS development team is pleased to release PostGIS 2.5.0rc2.

Although this release will work for PostgreSQL 9.4 and above, to take full advantage of what PostGIS 2.5 offers, you should be running PostgreSQL 11beta3+ and GEOS 3.7.0 which were released recently.

Best served with PostgreSQL 11beta3.

WARNING: If compiling with PostgreSQL 11+JIT, LLVM >= 6 is required

2.5.0rc2

• source download
• NEWS
• PDF docs en, de
• html doc download
• epub doc download
• pgsql help files for non-english languages: de, ja,kr, br, es
• Changelog

Changes since PostGIS 2.5.0rc1 release are as follows:

• 4162, ST_DWithin documentation examples for storing geometry and radius in table (Darafei Praliaskouski, github user Boscop).
• 4163, MVT: Fix resource leak when the first geometry is NULL (Raúl Marín)
• 4172, Fix memory leak in lwgeom_offsetcurve (Raúl Marín)
• 4164, Parse error on incorrectly nested GeoJSON input (Paul Ramsey)
• 4176, ST_Intersects supports GEOMETRYCOLLECTION (Darafei Praliaskouski)
• 4177, Postgres 12 disallows variable length arrays in C (Laurenz Albe)
• 4160, Use qualified names in topology extension install (Raúl Marín)
• 4180, installed liblwgeom includes sometimes getting used instead of source ones (Regina Obe)

View all closed tickets for 2.5.0.

After installing the binaries or after running pg_upgrade, make sure to do:

ALTER EXTENSION postgis UPDATE;

— if you use the other extensions packaged with postgis — make sure to upgrade those as well

ALTER EXTENSION postgis_sfcgal UPDATE;
ALTER EXTENSION postgis_topology UPDATE;
ALTER EXTENSION postgis_tiger_geocoder UPDATE;

If you use legacy.sql or legacy_minimal.sql, make sure to rerun the version packaged with these releases.

PostGIS Patch Release 2.4.5

2018/09/12  in news ( release, 2.4.5 )

The PostGIS development team is pleased to provide bug fix 2.4.5 for the 2.4 stable branch.

View all closed tickets for 2.4.5.

After installing the binaries or after running pg_upgrade, make sure to do:

ALTER EXTENSION postgis UPDATE;

— if you use the other extensions packaged with postgis — make sure to upgrade those as well

ALTER EXTENSION postgis_sfcgal UPDATE;
ALTER EXTENSION postgis_topology UPDATE;
ALTER EXTENSION postgis_tiger_geocoder UPDATE;

If you use legacy.sql or legacy_minimal.sql, make sure to rerun the version packaged with these releases.

2.4.5

• source download
• NEWS
• pdf doc download
• html doc download
• epub doc download
• Changelog