It was nearly a decade ago when I first loaded OpenStreetMap data to PostGIS. Over the years my fingers have typed osm2pgsql --slim --drop ... countless times and I do not see an end to that trend anytime soon. One thing that is changing is that getting high quality OpenStreetMap data into PostGIS is easier than ever! This improvement in data quality is made possible by the new Flex output available in osm2pgsql 1.4.0, I wrote about my initial impressions of the Flex output a few weeks ago.

This post looks at how I am starting to use osm2pgsql's Flex output to provide a standardized and sanitized OpenStreetMap data set in Postgres/PostGIS. No longer is osm2pgsql limited to loading data to the 3-table structure (planet_osm_point, planet_osm_line and planet_osm_polygon) so I am eagerly converting to the Flex output and taking advantage of these changes! It is also easier than ever to create customized mix-and-match data loads for customized needs of specific projects.

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The osm2pgsql project has seen quite a bit of development over the past couple of years. This is a core piece of software used by a large number of people to load OpenStreetMap data into PostGIS / PostgreSQL databases, so it has been great to see the activity and improvements. Recently, I was contacted by Jochen Topf to see if I would give one of those (big!) improvements, osm2pgsql's new Flex output, a try. While the flex output is still marked as "experimental" it is already quite robust. In fact, I have already started thinking of the typical pgsql output I have used for nearly a decade as "the old output!"

So what does this new Flex output do for us? It gives us control over the imported data's format, structure and quality. This process uses Lua styles (scripts) to achieve powerful results. The legacy pgsql output from osm2pgsql gave you three (3) main tables with everything organized into points, lines and polygons, solely by geometry type. From a database design perspective this would be like keeping product prices, employee salaries and expense reports all in one table using the justification "they all deal with money." With the flex output we are no longer constrained by this legacy design. With that in mind, the rest of this post explores osm2pgsql's Flex output.

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A few months ago I started experimenting with a few project ideas involving data over space and time. Naturally, I want to use Postgres and PostGIS as the main workhorse for these projects, the challenge was working out exactly how to pull it all together. After a couple false starts I had to put those projects aside for other priorities. In my free time I have continued working through some related reading on the topic. I found why you should be using PostGIS trajectories by Anita Graser and recommend reading that before continuing with this post. In fact, read Evaluating Spatio-temporal Data Models for Trajectories in PostGIS Databases while you're at it! There is great information in those resources with more links to other resources.

This post outlines examples of how to use these new PostGIS trajectory tricks with OpenStreetMap data I already have available (load and prepare ). Often, trajectory examples assume using data collected from our new age of IoT sensors sending GPS points and timestamps. This example approaches trajectories from a data modeling perpective instead, showing how to synthesize trajectory data using pgrouting. Visualization of data is a critical component of sharing information, QGIS has long been my favorite GIS application to use with PostGIS data.

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The past few weeks I had been tossing around some ideas that resulted in me looking for a particular data set. I needed to get the bounding boxes for the most commonly used SRIDs (Spatial Reference IDentifier) in PostGIS to join with the public.spatial_ref_sys table. My hope was to be able to use the data to quickly identify local SRIDs for geometries spreading across the U.S. This data was needed to support another idea where I want both accurate spatial calculations and the best possible performance when working with large OpenStreetMap data sets.

The good news is now I have the exact data I was looking for. The unexpected bonus is that there is a much broader use case for this data in providing an easy way to find which SRIDs might be appropriate for a specific area!

This post explores this new data with an example of how to use it with pre-existing spatial data.

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With Postgres 13 released recently, a new season of testing has begun! I recently wrote about the impact of BTree index deduplication, finding that improvement is a serious win. This post continues looking at Postgres 13 by examining performance through a few steps of an OpenStreetMap data (PostGIS) workflow.

Reasons to upgrade

Performance appears to be a strong advantage to Postgres 13 over Postgres 12. Marc Linster wrote there's "not one headline-grabbing feature, but rather a wide variety of improvements along with updates to previously released features." I am finding that to be an appropriate description. At this point I intend to upgrade our servers for the improved performance, plus a few other cool benefits.

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