PostGIS 2.3 is still in its incubation, but I suspect it will be even more impressive than PostGIS 2.2.
PostGIS 2.2 was long in the oven, and out came out a lot,
but I'm hoping PostGIS 2.3 will have a shorter gestation period, but be just as, if not more impressive
than PostGIS 2.2.
Before starting my "what's already there and what I hope to be there" list for PostGIS 2.3, I'll point out things that PostGIS 2.2 brought
PostGIS 2.2 offerings
Many itemized in PostGIS 2.3 new features
- KNN for geography and 3D geometries
- Geometry clustering functions
- True distance KNN for PostgreSQL 9.5+. If you are using 9.5, your KNN is not just bounding box distance, but true real distance.
- Faster topology, now a lot has been moved into C for better performance.
- Lots more 3D advanced functions via SFCGAL, SFCGAL now installable as extension.
- Lots of new geometry functions like geometry clustering, geometry clipping, subdivide, trajectory functions
- More raster stats and create overview table function without having to rely on raster2pgsql
- Tiger geocoder updated for Tiger 2015 data. Address standardizer now part of PostGIS.
- Last but not least, we added Dan Baston to our Core Contributor list. He gave us all the clustering functions in PostGIS 2.2,
fixed lots of bugs and is already got more commits and proposed plans than anyone else for PostGIS 2.3. Go Dan go, and welcome.
Coming in PostGIS 2.3
Let's start with what we've already got available for testing for the brave-hearted.
What I hope will come
- Leveraging the parallel sequential scan functionality in PostgreSQL 9.6. I suspect we are close according to Paul Ramsey's Parallel PostGIS example
- Leveraging the parallel join support in PostgreSQL 9.6. This commit extended sequential scan to work with partitioned tables, so really excited to try it with Tiger geocoder. The join types supported are only nested joins and hash joins. Hard to tell how useful this will be and workloads it will help with. Also not sure how much lifting on our part if any to make it useful.
Perhaps Paul can provide comments, as I think he has some impressions already.
- Steve Woodbridge and I finally get time to start work on a more universal geocoder that works with other datasources besides TIGER and can be used internationally.
- More topology functions and faster topology functions