PostGIS 2.2 is planned to reach feature freeze June 30th 2015 so we can make the September PostgreSQL 9.5 curtain call with confidence. Great KNN enhancements for PostgreSQL 9.5 only users. I've been busy getting all my ducks lined up. A lot on tiger geocoder and address standardizer extension to be shipped with windows builds, story for later. One other feature we plan to ship with the windows PostGIS 2.2 builds is the ogr_fdw ogr_fdw Foreign data wrapper extension. I've been nagging Paul Ramsey a lot about issues with it, this in particular https://github.com/pramsey/pgsql-ogr-fdw/issues/25, and after some prodding, he finally put his nose in and fixed them and pinged Even Rouault for some help on a GDAL specific item.
Needless to say, I've been super happy with the progress and support I've gotten with ogr_fdw development and really enjoying my ogr_fdw use. The XLSX reading a file saved after the connection was open required a fix in GDAL 2.0 branch (which missed GDAL 2.0.0 release, so because of this, this new package contains a GDAL 2.0.1ish library. Hopeful GDAL 2.0.1 will be out before PostGIS 2.2.0 comes out so I can release without guilt with this fix.
What's packaged and where do I get it
One of the things we decided to take out of the new build is CURL support (it's still in for packaged www_fdw). We added in sqlite3 support (which opens up a couple of key spatial drivers needed by some of our clients). The main reason for the change is since we are shipping this with PostGIS 2.2, we didn't want the extra CURL dependency and none of our clients or users funding our work had a need for any of the ogr www based drivers (Google Fusion tables, CartoDb, WFS etc.). If you have issue with that, let us know.
We've also included the executables ogr2ogr.exe, ogrinfo.exe which gets built with GDAL. This we did mostly so you can see available formats and do basic troubleshooting: with command like:
ogrinfo --formats
Which outputs:
Supported Formats:
PCIDSK -raster,vector- (rw+v): PCIDSK Database File
PDF -raster,vector- (w+): Geospatial PDF
ESRI Shapefile -vector- (rw+v): ESRI Shapefile
MapInfo File -vector- (rw+v): MapInfo File
UK .NTF -vector- (ro): UK .NTF
OGR_SDTS -vector- (ro): SDTS
S57 -vector- (rw+v): IHO S-57 (ENC)
DGN -vector- (rw+): Microstation DGN
OGR_VRT -vector- (rov): VRT - Virtual Datasource
REC -vector- (ro): EPIInfo .REC
Memory -vector- (rw+): Memory
BNA -vector- (rw+v): Atlas BNA
CSV -vector- (rw+v): Comma Separated Value (.csv)
GML -vector- (rw+v): Geography Markup Language (GML)
GPX -vector- (rw+v): GPX
KML -vector- (rw+v): Keyhole Markup Language (KML)
GeoJSON -vector- (rw+v): GeoJSON
OGR_GMT -vector- (rw+): GMT ASCII Vectors (.gmt)
GPKG -raster,vector- (rw+vs): GeoPackage
SQLite -vector- (rw+v): SQLite / Spatialite
ODBC -vector- (rw+): ODBC
WAsP -vector- (rw+v): WAsP .map format
PGeo -vector- (ro): ESRI Personal GeoDatabase
MSSQLSpatial -vector- (rw+): Microsoft SQL Server Spatial Database
OpenFileGDB -vector- (rov): ESRI FileGDB
XPlane -vector- (rov): X-Plane/Flightgear aeronautical data
DXF -vector- (rw+v): AutoCAD DXF
Geoconcept -vector- (rw+): Geoconcept
GeoRSS -vector- (rw+v): GeoRSS
GPSTrackMaker -vector- (rw+v): GPSTrackMaker
VFK -vector- (ro): Czech Cadastral Exchange Data Format
PGDUMP -vector- (w+v): PostgreSQL SQL dump
OSM -vector- (rov): OpenStreetMap XML and PBF
GPSBabel -vector- (rw+): GPSBabel
SUA -vector- (rov): Tim Newport-Peace's Special Use Airspace Format
OpenAir -vector- (rov): OpenAir
OGR_PDS -vector- (rov): Planetary Data Systems TABLE
HTF -vector- (rov): Hydrographic Transfer Vector
AeronavFAA -vector- (rov): Aeronav FAA
Geomedia -vector- (ro): Geomedia .mdb
EDIGEO -vector- (rov): French EDIGEO exchange format
SVG -vector- (rov): Scalable Vector Graphics
Idrisi -vector- (rov): Idrisi Vector (.vct)
ARCGEN -vector- (rov): Arc/Info Generate
SEGUKOOA -vector- (rov): SEG-P1 / UKOOA P1/90
SEGY -vector- (rov): SEG-Y
XLS -vector- (ro): MS Excel format
ODS -vector- (rw+v): Open Document/ LibreOffice / OpenOffice Spreadsheet
XLSX -vector- (rw+v): MS Office Open XML spreadsheet
Walk -vector- (ro): Walk
SXF -vector- (ro): Storage and eXchange Format
Selafin -vector- (rw+v): Selafin
JML -vector- (rw+v): OpenJUMP JML
TIGER -vector- (rw+v): U.S. Census TIGER/Line
AVCBin -vector- (ro): Arc/Info Binary Coverage
AVCE00 -vector- (ro): Arc/Info E00 (ASCII) Coverage
or try to verify a connection if you have issue with something like
ogrinfo ODBC:user/password@SQLServerDSNName -sql "SELECT table_name, column_name from information_schema.columns WHERE column_name = 'FirstName'"
The ogr_fdw_info doesn't have a --formats option
ODBC Support
The most sort after driver support at least for windows users is the ODBC support (particularly for connecting to SQL Server databases). Someone wrote me about this trying to use the old odbc_fdw we talked about a while ago, and I told him to use ogr_fdw instead since its much more robust and support 9.3 and 9.4
I mentioned in Querying MS Access and other ODBC data sources with OGR_FDW it's use with MS Access, but still plan to follow up soon with a SQL Server example.
With SQL Server there are two drivers, which both rely on ODBC support. The ODBC connection form requires a system dsn. The MSSQLSpatial you can do with a DSNLess connection, but there is an extra environment variable you need to set. More on that in our followup article.