CREATE SCHEMA IF NOT EXISTS in 9.3 and tiger geocoder

One of the new features in PostgreSQL 9.3 is CREATE SCHEMA IF NOT EXISTS someschema;. We were so excited about this new feature that we started using it in the tiger geocoder loader routine. For some reason we thought it was available since 9.1 which gained CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS sometable; which we noted in Sweat the small stuff, it really matters

Luckily someone noticed. Fix is already in PostGIS 2.1.1 and 2.2. dev branch. We are planning for upcoming PostGIS 2.1.1 to be out in another 2-3 weeks.

PostGIS tiger geocoder installed as extension

One of the new features in 2.1 which is my favorite and the one we worked on the most is that tiger geocoder is now installable as an extension

CREATE EXTENSION fuzzystrmatch;
CREATE EXTENSION postgis_tiger_geocoder;

-- bonus if you compiled address_standardizer 
-- (this will come with windows stackbuilder installs and is already available 
-- with experimental windows builds
CREATE EXTENSION address_standardizer;

PostGIS 2.2 - Tiger 2013

For PostGIS 2.2., tiger geocoder will be set to load US Census TIGER 2013. US Census Tiger 2013 came out recently August 22, 2013. In fact it does now as far as I can tell. As far as I can tell, not much has changed in this new release that prevents the present loader packaged in 2.1 from loading it. All you need to change is the tiger.loader_variables table change tiger_year to 2013 and website_ftproot to ftp://ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2013. W'ell be comparing geocoding between old data set and new before we announce victory.

A quick spot check loading Massachusetts state data shows more records in ma_addr and ma_featnames, but fewer in ma_edges.

We still need to go thru some regressions to see how much has changed and if we need to make adjustments to logic.