Companies Come Together to Fund PostgreSQL Improvements

1 January 1970

Companies from around the world have joined forces to fund performance improvements to the PostgreSQL open source database. By pooling resources, the contributing companies have saved money while gaining important new database features for their businesses. Now, Refractions Research is pleased to report the completion of this collaborative effort to bring important concurrency improvements to the PostgreSQL GiST indexing subsystem.

The GiST indexing system is used by several PostgreSQL extensions, most notably the OpenFTS text indexing system, and Refractions' own PostGIS geospatial database extension.

"A few months ago, we learned that the GiST developers were looking for funding to provide row-level locking in the GiST indexes," said Paul Ramsey, President of Refractions, "We knew how important this improvement would be to our users, so we went to our user community, told them we were looking for funding, and put up the first $2000 ourselves to prime the pump."

Members of the PostGIS community were quick to respond. In total $8000 were raised to support the enhancements, from corporate donors Refractions, Cadcorp SIS, GlobeXplorer, Mobile Meridian, WebBased, Intevation, RealGo, Mercator GeoSystems and from individuals.

"With the number of users of our systems expected to quadruple this year, the improvements to GiST were crucial to support the ever increasing demands being placed upon our central on-line systems," said Mark Cave-Ayland, Senior Developer at WebBased. "We are very pleased to have been able to contribute financially toward this project for the benefit of all users."

"We and our users have benefited from the free availability of PostGIS for some time now, and so we were happy to support this important project that takes the final step towards enterprise status," stated Martin Daly, technical director, Cadcorp. "We know from our own experience that PostGIS is now capable of handling very large datasets, right up to national coverage of Ordnance Survey MasterMap(tm): a spatial dataset of over 425 million features."

Refractions provided centralized accounting, quality assurance, and results verification free of charge. "It was important for contributors to know that a third party had validated the improvements before signing off on invoices", said Ramsey.

The improvements were carried out by the PostgreSQL GiST developers, Oleg Bartunov of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute and Teodor Sigaev of Delta-Soft LLC.

Bartunov stressed the broad utility of the upgrade. "Our work ensures all GiST-based PostgreSQL extensions, such as tsearch2, ltree, intarray, PostGIS automatically inherit concurrency and recovery support."

The GiST improvements are currently available in the PostgreSQL CVS software repository, and will be included in the upcoming version 8.1 release of PostgreSQL.

About Refractions Research
Refractions Research (http://www.refractions.net) is a consulting and product development organization, dedicated to open source spatial technology. Refractions is the principal developer of the PostGIS (http://postgis.refractions.net) open source spatial database, and the uDig (http://udig.refractions.net) open source spatial application framework.

About Delta-Soft LLC
Delta-Soft (http://www.pgsql.ru/ds) is a profitable Moscow based company focused on development of complex information retrieval systems and specialized search engines. The Delta-Soft development team consists of graduate members of the Moscow University and participates in many commercial andopen source projects.

About Cadcorp SIS
Established in 1991, Cadcorp (http://www.cadcorp.com) is a leading UK developer of digital mapping and geographic information systems (GIS) software. With offices in the UK, USA and Australia, Cadcorp's distribution and VAR network stretches worldwide. The company also plays a pivotal technical role in the Open Geospatial Consortium. Inc (OGC).

About WebBased Ltd
WebBased (http://www.webbased.co.uk) specialise in the design and production of Internet, Database and Imaging Technologies for education and business and has a portfolio of regional and international clients. The company has grown naturally, with no outside investment, through successful projects and client recommendations.

About GlobeXplorer
GlobeXplorer (http://www.globexplorer.com) is the leading provider of satellite images and aerial photography via the Internet. We offer quick, efficient and affordable access to professional-quality images, enabling businesses and consumers to dynamically pull interactive aerial images in to their Web sites extending the value of their services to their customers.

About Intevation GmbH
Intevation (http://www.intevation.de) is an intelligent consulting company based on Free Software. We offer communication management for Free Software projects and strategic consulting for Free Software business models. Intevation actively contributes to the Free Software Community and supports freegis.org and the FSF Europe among other projects.

About Mobile Meridian
Mobile Meridian LLC (http://www.mobilemeridian.com/) is a leading developer of network performance analysis tools and services for the wireless industry. They provide clients with revolutionary ways to present performance data using its GIS-enabled data warehouse. Mobile Meridian is a privately-held company based in Chicago.

About RealGo
RealGo (http://www.realgo.com) provides a fully customized solution to MLS associations. We believe that customization means more than just changing datafields. Our clients have the ability to alter the "look-and-feel", the program flow, and even change functionality to meet the specific needs of their subscribers.

About Mercator GeoSystems Ltd
Mercator GeoSystems (http://www.mercatorgeosystems.co.uk/) is a small, friendly, GIS consultancy and development company based in Sheffield, England. We specialise in the design, development and implementation of "Enterprise GIS" in the corporate, government and utilities environments as well as providing site location analysis and decision support software.

About PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org), the highly scalable, SQL compliant, open source object-relational database management system, is now undergoing beta testing of the next version of their software: PostgreSQL 8.1.