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One of the features we are most excited about in recently released PostgreSQL 14 is the introduction of Multirange types. In a nutshell Multirange types are sets of non-overlapping ranges. Unlike array of ranges, they prevent overlaps and thus allow you to effectively model ranges with gaps.

One of the use cases we have for them is modeling time. For example if you wanted to keep track of the cumulative periods and how many days someone is in a hospital, you could store this as a datemultirange type.

There are quite a few operators and functions available in PostgreSQL 14, but some glaring ones we'd need include aggregates such as a union aggregate. That currently doesn't exist. There are however your standard operators like + (union two ranges) and * for intersection, and - for difference as well as your common containment boolean operators.

With most types you deal with in SQL and more specifically PostgreSQL, when you use a condition such as something IS NULL and it returns false, you can be assured that something IS NOT NULL would return true. This is not the case with composite types.

Someone reported recently on PostGIS mailing list, that they were unable to install PostGIS 2.2.1 bundle or PostGIS 2.2.2 binaries on a clean PostgreSQL 9.5.2 install. Someone also complained about PostgreSQL 9.3 (though not clear the version) if that is a separate issue or the same. I have tested on PostgreSQL 9.5.2 Windows 64-bit and confirmed the issue. The issue does not affect PostgreSQL 9.5.1 and older. I haven't confirmed its an issue with the 32-bit installs, but I suspect so too. This issue will affect OGR_FDW users and people who used our compiled WWW_FDW.

All this time we've been using COPY FROM PROGRAM without any additional adornments. Then we noticed for some things like directory listings in Microsoft windows, it would come across a sequence of inputs it mangled or you may even get an error such as ERROR: end-of-copy marker corrupt.

The trick to get around the issue is to use the FORMAT option. The default FORMAT for COPY FROM PROGRAM is 'text', which tries to escape out some things and in doing so it misinterprets windows slashes so you get weird stuff or no stuff at all.

Lately I've been experimenting with building semi-schemaless apps. These are apps where much of the data may never be used for reporting aside from story telling and also that as time goes by some of these may be revisited and converted to more structured fields for easier roll-up and reporting. For the front-end UI, I'm using AngularJS which naturally spits out data as JSON and can autobind to JSON data of any complexity. My stored functions in PostgreSQL take JSON blobs as inputs spit it out into various tables and throws the whole thing in a jsonb field for later consumption (it's a bit redundant). Similarly they return JSON back. One of the things I wanted to be able to do was take this jsonb blob and tack on additional properties from well-structured fields or even a whole set of data like sub recordsets to feed back to my app in JSON. While there are lots of functions in PostgreSQL 9.3/9.4 that can easily build json objects from records, aggregate rows, etc. I couldn't find a function that allowed me to just add a property to an existing JSON object, so I went to my tried and true old-pal PL/V8 for some comfort. Here is a quickie function I created in PL/V8 that did what I needed. Hopefully it will be of use to others or others might have other ideas of doing this that I missed.

Though it is a rare occurrence, we have had occasions where we need to purge ALL data from a table. Our preferred is the TRUNCATE TABLE approach because it's orders of magnitude faster than the DELETE FROM construct. You however can't use TRUNCATE TABLE unqualified, if the table you are truncating has foreign key references from other tables. In comes its extended form, the TRUNCATE TABLE .. CASCADE construct which was introduced in PostgreSQL 8.2, which will not only delete all data from the main table, but will CASCADE to all the referenced tables.

One of the neat little features that arrived at PostgreSQL 9.4 is the WITH ORDINALITY ANSI-SQL construct. What this construct does is to tack an additional column called ordinality as an additional column when you use a set returning function in the FROM part of an SQL Statement.

At FOSS4G we gave two presentations. The videos from other presentations are FOSS4G 2014 album. I have to commend the organizers for gathering such a rich collection of videos. Most of the videos turned out very well and are also downloadable in MP4 in various resolutions. It really was a treat being able to watch all I missed. I think there are still some videos that will be uploaded soon. As mentioned lots of PostGIS/PostgreSQL talks (or at least people using PostGIS/PostgreSQL in GIS).

A while back, we discussed using pgAdmin pgScript as a quicky way for running a repetitive update script where you want each loop to commit right away. Since stored functions have to commit as a whole, you can't use stored functions alone for this kind of processing.

If you are using the psql client packaged with PostgreSQL 9.3 or above, then you can take advantage of the \watch command that was introduced in that version of psql. We'll demonstrate that by doing a batch geocoding exercise with PostGIS tiger geocoder and also revise our example from the prior article to use the more efficient and terser LATERAL construct introduced in PostgreSQL 9.3.

PostgreSQL 9.3 will be coming out in beta soon and with that, some who want to experiment with both PostGIS and PostgreSQL 9.3 have asked if they can use PostGIS 2.0. The answer is NO. A lot of major changes happened in PostgreSQL 9.3 that required us to patch up upcoming PostGIS 2.1. These changes were not backported to 2.0 and I personally do not plan to back-port them unless lightning strikes me and I escape unscathed, a big wad of cash falls from the sky, or for some reason we can't make the 2.1 cut before 9.3 comes out. So if you are planning to experiment with PostgreSQL 9.3, PLEASE use PostGIS 2.1 development branch. I will try to make sure we release 2.1 before PostgreSQL 9.3 comes out even if I have to resort to hitting some people over the head with a rubber bat :).

If ever in doubt what versions of PostGIS works with what versions of PostgreSQL /GEOS / GDAL, please refer to the matrix that we try to keep up to date. http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/wiki/UsersWikiPostgreSQLPostGIS.

Now some people might say "Isn't it cruel not to support PostGIS 2.0 for 9.3", and my answer is "it's crueler to". The reason is simple. We have limited bandwidth for testing permutations of things and the more permutations of things we support, the dirtier our code base becomes making it harder to maintain and also the less time we can devote to properly testing each permutation. I'd rather say we don't support something than to do a half-hearted job of supporting all. On a slightly different, but also pragmatic note, package maintainers (except for windows maintainers :)) generally only carry one version of PostGIS per version of PostgreSQL, and I'd rather users getting from packages see our best foot than a two year old aging foot.

Note: that going from PostGIS 2.0 to 2.1 is a soft upgrade so you can install 2.1 on your existing PostgreSQL 9.2 without dump restore and then you should be able to pg_upgrade over to 9.3 if your database is too big to dump restore.

Should I install using PostGIS extension? is an FAQ that comes up quite a bit in PostGIS circles and unfortunately askers get mixed answers. In How to upgrade your database to PostGIS 2.0 we covered WHY you should use extensions. In this article I'll use my Lincoln-Douglas debate skills to argue why you shouldn't. Keep in mind that I put a great deal of effort in fitting PostGIS extensions into the existing PostGIS build structure and I eat my own dogfood, so I might be a little biased and a poor defender of the counter argument.

PostgreSQL allows you to customize statement logging in numerous ways. You can globally set the level of logging you want at both the postgresql.conf (that will affect all databases) or at the database level using the various log_statement* variables. Most of these are documented in runtime config logging.

For this brief article, we'll talk about the log_line_prefix variable. By default this variable is very minimalistic and just prefixes the log lines with the date time of the statement. If you have just one database (like the way Oracle runs) this is not a big deal, but if you are like us and run several databases on one PostgreSQL instance, it would be nice to as part of the prefix include the database name.

This exercise is a continuation of our How to bulk export tables from MS Access and How to recreate MS Access primary keys and indexes in PostgreSQL. As mentioned in the first article, when you use the built-in export feature of MS Access, it exports autonumber fields as integers instead of the more appropriate PostgreSQL pseudo serial type.

The serial type in PostgreSQL is not really a type though, so this behavior is expected. The serial type is really short-hand for defining an integer column and a corresponding sequence object with a specific naming convention and setting the default value to the next value of the sequence. So this is what we will do in this exercise after we have already exported our data to PostgreSQL. The script we are about to demonstrate will generate an sQL script containing all the CREATE SEQUENCE, and ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN SET DEFAULT .. needed to convert our integer column to a serial column.

As a side note, Mark mentioned a similar approach to what we've been describing here, but builds all the table , key structures utilizing python. You can check out the python script at http://code.activestate.com/recipes/52267-reverse-engineer-ms-accessjet-databases

This exercise is a continuation of our How to bulk export tables from MS Access. Now while this approach will work for other databases besides PostgreSQL, you'll probably need to fiddle with the subroutine to make it work for some other databases. PostgreSQL is fairly ANSI-SQL standard so not too much fiddling should be required to port to SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle etc.

Unlike the prior Visual basic subroutine we showed that exports the tables, this just creates an SQL script that you run on the already created PostgreSQL database that contains the exported data. We didn't test the quote option though we coded it in the subroutine, since like we said we hate having to quote fields. If perchance you are one of those folks that likes to put spaces in your field names to make it more englishy, then you'll need to quote or revise the other routine to convert your spaces to _ or some other thing.

Despite all the nasty things people say about MS Access, it does have fairly database agnostic, easy to use import and export tools and a not too shabby query wizard and query tool. But of course, it's not a server side database so at a certain point won't scale for database storage. You can still use it as a front-end to a server-side database such as PostgreSQL or SQL Server. So once you outgrow it for data storage, you'll probably want a quick way to export your data out. Unfortunately, well at least in the 2003 version, while you can bulk link tables from an ODBC connection, you can only export one table at a time using the "select table" right-click export. In this article we'll show a quick and dirty export MS Access Visual basic sub routine we use to export all tables. This we've only tested on MS Access 2003, so if you are using higher, you might need to customize it a bit. This script should work fine for exporting to any database connection with modification of the connection string.