This month we we will be giving two mini-tutorials at PgCon East 2010 on Saturday, March 27th. The topic of the talks will be, you guessed it, PostGIS. We have changed our Beyond talk to PostGIS: Adding spatial support to PostgreSQL to a beginner focus instead of an intermediate focus. Topic content will be more or less the same but focused more on people new to spatial database analysis. Our web applications talk will cater more to the web developer trying to integrate PostGIS in their web applications.

Marcus Rouhani of the Federal Aviation Administation will also be talking about the Airport GIS project and migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL.

On a somewhat related note, we also hope to be finished with all the chapters of our upcoming book this month. We just completed the first draft of our Chapter 10: PostgreSQL Add-ons and ancillary tools. After some back and forth with our editor, this will be up on MEAP, available for read and comments for early book buyers. Still two more chapters to finish after that before we get to the polishing of the text, images, layout and final print version.

Our publisher Manning is running a 50% off sale this Friday (tomorrow or is it today) on any MEAP book and they have a lot of interesting ones in the pipeline (including ours).

Waiting for PostGIS 2.0

The OSGEO just completed a recent coding sprint in New York. The New York sprint was a meeting of the minds of OSGEO people from various projects -- PostGIS, Mapserver, Geoserver, OpenLayers, GDAL, and some others were represented. Sadly we were not able to attend this one. A summary of the sprint with a PostGIS bent can be found on Olivier Courtin's New York sprint summary (Original French Version) and Olivier Courtin's New York sprint summary (Google English translation) and Paul's New York sprint summary.

Continue reading "What is New in PostGIS Land"

This is a rebuttal to depesz's charx, varcharx, varchar, and text and David Fetter's varchar(n) considered harmful. I respect both depesz and David and in fact enjoy reading their blogs. We just have deferring opinions on the topic.

For starters, I am pretty tired of the following sentiments from some PostgreSQL people:

• 99% of the people who choose varchar(x) over text in PostgreSQL in most cases are just ignorant folk and don't realize that text is just as fast if not faster than varchar in PostgreSQL.
• stuff your most despised database here compatibility is not high on my priority list.
• It is unfortunate you have to work with the crappy tools you work with that can't see the beauty in PostgreSQL text implementation. Just get something better that treats PostgreSQL as the superior creature it is.

Continue reading "In Defense of varchar(x)"

Why is it that Windows has so much difficulty in finding content on its file system? This is not an insurmountable technical problem; on my laptop, I have a database within which I can instantly find text or names within millions of records, within 300 milliseconds.

At first it seems odd that one of the world's more ubiquitous brands needs to run a big print campaign in public places - surely they have all the fluency they need? Well, not so much. Chrome, after all, is not the same as their core product, so there's some basic awareness work to do, and maybe a whole new batch of exposure effect to try and grab.

Even an experienced DBA finds it safer to double-check that all the tasks have been done, and in the right order. Buck Woody continues his series with another handy checklist, army-style.

Even an experienced DBA finds it safer to double-check that all the tasks have been done, and in the right order. Buck Woody continues his series with another handy checklist, army-style.

Excuse me, was that geek or Greek?

In the second part of Phil's series of articles on finding stuff (such as objects, scripts, entities, metadata) in SQL Server, he offers some scripts that should be handy for the developer faced with tracking down problem areas and potential weaknesses in a database.

With Clojure soon to be ported to the .NET framework, as ClojureCLR, we felt that the time had come to see what the fuss was all about amongst the Java Geeks. We sent Richard Morris to find out from the creator of Clojure, Rich Hickey.

Key Performance Indicators, which vary according to the application, are widely used as a measure of the performance of parts of an organization. Analysis Services makes this KPI data easily available to your cube. All you have to do is to follow Rob Sheldon's simple instructions.

The logical step for Microsoft after successfully launching the .NET framework would be to base the entire operating system on the .NET framework, and to re-engineer its own applications. In 2002, Bill Gates, then Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect said about their plans for .NET, "This is a long-term approach. These things don't happen overnight." Now, eight years later, we're still waiting for signs of the 'long-term approach'.

Sometimes, it is a great idea to push away the keyboard when tackling the problems of an ill-performing, complex, query, and take up pencil and paper instead. By drawing a diagram to show of all the tables involved, the joins, the volume of data involved, and the indexes, you'll see more easily the relative efficiency of the possible paths that your query could take through the tables.

Microsoft Small Basic is intended to be fun to use. It is that, and more besides. It has a great potential as a way of flinging together quick and cheerful applications, just like those happy days of childhood. Tetris anyone?

Reflector 6 is here. Nick Hamilton is a long-time Reflector enthusiast, and has been responsible for writing an add-in. As he'd helped test the new version, Nick asked to review it for Simple-Talk. The team were anxious to know what he thought. They needn't have worried.

People keep saying that Entity Framework is simple to learn. Simple? Well, finally, we're going to be forced to agree, thanks to James Johnson's new series on learning EF the hands-on way.