PostGIS

PostGIS (/post'-jis/) is an open source software program that adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. PostGIS follows the Simple Features for SQL specification from the Open Geospatial Consortium. As such, PostGIS includes: The PostGIS implementation is based on "light-weight" geometries and indexes optimized to reduce disk and memory footprint. Using light-weight geometries helps servers increase the amo... more

PostGIS (/post'-jis/) is an open source software program that adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. PostGIS follows the Simple Features for SQL specification from the Open Geospatial Consortium. As such, PostGIS includes: The PostGIS implementation is based on "light-weight" geometries and indexes optimized to reduce disk and memory footprint. Using light-weight geometries helps servers increase the amount of data migrated up from physical disk storage into RAM, improving query performance substantially. The first version was released in 2001 by Refractions Research under the GNU General Public License. A stable "1.0" version was released on April 19, 2005, which followed 6 release candidates. In 2006, PostGIS was certified as a compliant Simple Features for SQL database by the Open Geospatial Consortium. There are a large number of software products that can use PostGIS as a database backend, including: See http://www.refractions.net... less