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This post is a quick instruction for installing Postgres 9.2, PostGIS 2.0 and pgRouting 2.0.

  1. For Postgres, download the installer from enterprisedb.com.
  2. Run the installer. You’ll have to pick a superuser password – remember it, you’ll need it again soon.
  3. At the end of the installation process, allow the installer to start Stack Builder.
  4. In Stack Builder, select the Postgres 9.2 installation and install PostGIS from the list of available extensions.
  5. The PostGIS installation procedure will prompt you for the superuser password you picked before.
  6. I suggest letting the installer create a sample database We’ll need it later anyway.

Now for the pgRouting part:

  1. Download the pgRouting zip file for your system (32 or 64 bit) from Winnie.
  2. Unzip the file. It contains bin, lib and share folders as well as two text files.
  3. Copy these folders and files over to your Postgres installation. In my case C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.2

Installation – done.

Next, fire up pgAdmin. If you allowed the PostGIS installer to create a sample database, you will find it named postgis20 or similar. Otherwise just create a new database using the PostGIS template database. You can enable pgRouting in a database using the following steps:

  1. In postgis20, execute the following query to create the pgrouting extension. This will add the pgRouting-specific functions:
    CREATE EXTENSION pgrouting;
  2. Test if everything worked fine:
    SELECT pgr_version();

    It should return "(2.0.0-dev,v2.0.0-beta,18,a3be38b,develop,1.46.1)" or similar – depending on the version you downloaded.

pgadmin_pgrouting

How about some test data? I’ll be using the public transport network of the city of Vienna provided in GeoJSON format from http://data.wien.gv.at/daten/geo?service=WFS&request=GetFeature&version=1.1.0&typeName=ogdwien:OEFFLINIENOGD&srsName=EPSG:4326&outputFormat=json:

    1. Just copy paste the url in Add Vector Layer | Protocol to load the dataset.
    2. Use DB Manager to load the layer into your database. (As you can see in the screenshot, I created a schema called network but that’s optional.)

import_publictransport

  1. To make the line vector table routable, we use pgr_createTopology. This function assumes the columsn called “source” and “target” exist so we have to create those as well:
    alter table network.publictransport add column source integer;
    alter table network.publictransport add column target integer;
    select pgr_createTopology('network.publictransport', 0.0001, 'geom', 'id');
    

    I’m quite generously using a tolerance of 0.0001 degrees to build the topology. Depending on your dataset, you might want to be more strict here.

  2. Let’s test it! Route from source #1 to target #3000 using pgr_dijkstra:
    SELECT seq, id1 AS node, id2 AS edge, cost, geom
      FROM pgr_dijkstra(
        'SELECT id, source, target, st_length(geom) as cost FROM network.publictransport',
        1, 3000, false, false
      ) as di
      JOIN network.publictransport pt
      ON di.id2 = pt.id ;

    Note how the query joins the routing results and the network table together. (I’m aware that using the link length as a cost attribute will not lead to realistic results in a public transport network but bear with me for this example.)

  3. We can immediately see the routing results using the Load as new layer option:

select_dijkstra
route

Nice work! pgRouting 2.0 has come a long way. In a post from April this year, Boston GIS even announced to add pgRouting into the Stack Builder. That’s going to make the installation even more smooth.

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For everyone working with spatial databases in QGIS there comes a time when “Add PostGIS/SpatiaLite Layer” and “RT Sql Layer” start to be annoying. You always have to retype or copy-paste your SQL queries into the user interface if you need to change the tiniest thing in the layer’s definition.

This is where “Fast SQL Layer” can be a real time saver. Fast SQL Layer is a new plugin for QGIS by Pablo T. Carreira. It basically adds an SQL console for loading layers from PostGIS/SpatiaLite into QGIS. And it even comes with syntax highlighting!

Installation

Fast SQL Layer comes with one dependency: Pygments, which is used for syntax highlighting.

On Ubuntu, all you have to do is install it with apt-get:

sudo apt-get install python-pygments

For Windows with OSGeo4W, @Mike_Toews posted this on gis.stackexchange:

I downloaded and extracted Pygments-1.4.tar.gz, then in an OSGeo4W shell within the Pygments-1.4 directory, type python setup.py build then python setup.py install

Usage

When you activate the plugin in plugin manager, a dock widget will appear which contains the console and some fields for specifying the database connection that should be used. Then, you can simply write your SQL query and load the results with one click.

Fast SQL plugin

In this example, I renamed “gid” to “id”, but you can actually edit the values in the drop down boxes to adjust the column names for id and geometry:

A second layer loaded using Fast SQL plugin

It certainly needs some polishing on the user interface side but I really like it.

Do you need a random sample of features in a Postgres table? Here is an example of how to select 1,000 random features from a table:

SELECT * FROM myTable
WHERE attribute = 'myValue'
ORDER BY random()
LIMIT 1000;

Besides many other interesting topics, Opengeo’s PostGIS tutorial discusses “Tuning PostgreSQL for Spatial”.

The following values are recommended for production environments:

  • shared_buffers: 75 % of database memory (500 MB)
  • work_mem: 16 MB
  • maintenance_work_mem: 128 MB
  • wal_buffers: 1 MB
  • checkpoint_segments: 6
  • random_page_cost: 2.0
  • seq_page_cost: 1.0

All of these configuration parameters can edited in the database configuration file, C:\Documents and Settings\%USER\.opengeo\pgdata\%USER. This is a regular text file and can be edited using Notepad or any other text editor. An easier way of editing this configuration is by using the built-in “Backend Configuration Editor”. In pgAdmin, go to File > Open postgresql.conf…. It will ask for the location of the file, and navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\%USER\.opengeo\pgdata\%USER.

The changes will not take effect until the server is restarted.

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