I took today off from work to catch up on a couple things, including installing Postgres 9.1 and PostGIS 2.0 on my home machine. Lately, I’ve been neglecting how I manage my geo-data on my home machine for my personal projects and I told myself it was time for an upgrade. The recent release of PostGIS 2.0 was good motivation for this project as well!
I was planning a couple hours from start to finish for this project, and did I over estimate the time it would take! After I downloaded, installed and configured Postgres 9.1 for a 64 bit Windows machine and ran the StackBuilder to install PostGIS 2, I had everything configured within a hour (and that includes me watching several random YouTube videos!).
I then used the handy shapefile loader to batch load a few global datasets and voila, PostGIS 2.0 data in Quantum:
It has been a really good year for the OpenGIS community so far, and the release of PostGIS 2 should really keep the momentum going. I haven’t been a Postgres or PostGIS power user for a couple years now, but I hope to get back on track soon, exploring all the new features of PostGIS 2.0.
We should be very thankful to the community of developers who create and maintain these amazing tools and applications, who then give them away for free! If you are a GIS aficionado and you don’t have PostGIS, Quantum, TileMill or any other open source GIS tools go and install a couple of them and test them out.