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Wednesday, June 18. 2008


Portable GIS: PostgreSQL and PostGIS on a USB Stick

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First this is a windows only package, but nevertheless sweet. In our article What can PostgreSQL learn from MySQL? we complained about the fact that there is nothing like Server2GO pre-packaged with PostgreSQL. Low and behold comes this thing called Portable GIS 1.2 which can be downloaded from http://www.archaeogeek.com/blog/portable-gis/. This is similar in architecture to Portable Apps. Its a suite of applications you can run from your USB drive without having to reboot your windows computer.

I'm not sure if a similar thing exists for Linux, but would be nice to know if it does. Note: all the packages this portable tool set comes with work on Linux and most started life on Linux, so it seems to me it should not be too hard to make a Linux port of this if it doesn't already exist. Also most of these tools work on Mac OSX as well so a similar package can be made for Mac OSX.

The package is a bit hefty at 460 MB and is still alpha quality, but comes packaged with sample data and all any beginning or experienced GIS user needs to carry along with them. To boot it would provide a good intro to increasing the PostgreSQL family. Unfortunately we don't have a virgin windows computer that doesn't have some of these packages installed to try this out on.

Now this bag of treats comes with the following packages:

  • PostgreSQL 8.2 - would be nice if this were bumped up to 8.3 and they packaged PgAdmin III in here.
  • PostGIS 1.1 - would be nice if they could bump this to 1.3.3. We already covered PostGIS in PostGIS for geospatial analysis and mapping in our first issue.
  • Desktop - GRASS - which is a popular GIS analysis and visualization tool. Works with PostGIS among other formats.
  • Desktop - QGIS (version 0.10 with GRASS plugin) - this is a popular GIS visualization and editing tool very handy for viewing and editing PostGIS geometries
  • Desktop - gvSIG (version 1.1) - this is another popular open source GIS viewing/editing tool funded by governement of Spain with a similar feel we are told to ESRI ArcView. It supports editing and viewing of PostGIS layers similar to QGIS. The other thing that is interesting about this desktop app is that it totes a mobile edition for running on Mobile devices.
  • There are some other noteworthy open source GIS desktop tools left out of this package - uDig and OpenJump come to mind, but those tend to cater to more advanced users.
  • Command Line - FWTools (GDAL and OGR toolkit, version 2.10). This is a data conversion, data transformation, data loading tool that deals with both relational spatial data and raster data. We already described this tool and how to use it in GDAL OGR2OGR for Data Loading.
  • Web Apps - Mapserver - this is a very popular open source mapserver originally developed by University of Minnesota and adopted over the years by other developers. It can run on Apache or IIS , is pretty light-weight, and conforms to OpenGIS standards such as Web Map Service and Web Feature Service standards.
  • Web Apps - OpenLayers - this is a javascript mapping toolkit developed by local MetaCarta that can be used for querying multiple disparate mapping services such as Google Maps, Virtual Earth, standard WMS, loading KML and displaying in a single map view. Very handy if you have your own custom data layers you want to dish out via MapServer, GeoServer, or FeatureServer and overlay on top of commodity layers such as those provided by Google, Yahoo, Virtual Earth. Its our favorite mapping toolkit because of its versatility and relative lightness.
  • Tilecache, FeatureServer - these are also MetaCarta open source contributions - TileCache caches image tiles to allow you to develop your own google map like tile server. FeatureServer is basically a REST-based GIS Feature server that allows you to feed various disparate datasources and edit them - e.g. PostGIS, Oracle, etc. Its a nice complement to OpenLayers. We briefly described the concepts behind REST in Showcasing REST in PostgreSQL - The PreQuel.
  • Geoserver - this is a very popular Open Source Web mapping server. It is built on top of Java and Java Servlets. There is a lot of overlap between what Geoserver and Mapserver do. Both support WMS and WFS standards. Geoserver is a bit harder to configure and needs a servlet engine such as Tomcat to work and in general is not as light. It does torte WFS-T capability which means you can edit geometries with it e.g. via OpenLayers which you can't do with Mapserver.
Posted by Leo Hsu and Regina Obe in postgis, product showcase at 08:48 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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As the author of the package, many thanks for taking the time to download it and try it out!

I would like to respond to one or two points though- firstly all the packages are designed to run on the stick with no installation on your hard drive. This means that a few packages, such as pgadmin3 probably won't work. Not sure about uDig or OpenJump. Adding extra packages wouldn't help the download size much either!

I have thought about making versions for linux and macosx, but, at least at this stage, it's not top priority. That's partly because I believe linux users (and mac users to some extent) are more used to open source software, and are familiar with somewhat esoteric installation and configuration methods- so they don't need someone to do the hard work for them. I thought of this as getting open source GIS to the windows masses without them being scared off during the installation part. I know how that feels- I nearly gave up on a number of occasions early on!

Thirdly- about the alpha-quality- feedback is always appreciated and I hope that people will report any problems or improvements to me. I do have some ideas for making it look more professional, but it's not my day job though so these things take time...
#1 Archaeogeek (Homepage) on 2008-06-18 09:19 (Reply)
Jo,

You are welcome. It worked fine for me so far, but I wanted to test it on a virgin install to be fair.

Are you sure you need PgAdmin III to be installed to work. I remember way back I would just extract the files to a file share and run them from there but that was a couple years ago.

I just uninstalled my PgAdmin III and tried running it from a file folder and it worked fine. But this isn't a fair test since I may have the whole dependency libraries etc. on my machine. I'm going to find someone nearby that I can stick this USB stick in that I know doesn't use open source and see if it works. I'm also going to copy over the PgAdmin III files to the USB to test if it can work without installation.

It would be a nice addition since windows people tend to be command line scared.

This is truly a great addition and I appreciate the great generosity involved in putting in the time to do this.
#1.1 Regina on 2008-06-18 12:45 (Reply)
how did you manage to make postgresql portable ?
#2 inglese on 2008-07-04 05:55 (Reply)

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